Experience of building a high-fidelity mobile crane simulator with cluster of desktop computers

The paper presents the technique and experience of building a high-fidelity visual interactive simulator on a cluster of desktop computers (COD). The COD is a fully distributed computation environment that is constructed by clustering several desktop computers to form a high-performance computation environment. The contributions of the paper include proposing a method to build a high-fidelity interactive visual simulator on a cluster of desktop computers. A distribution socket, called Communication Backbone (CB), is designed and implemented to achieve this goal. In addition, the proposed architecture is used to construct a mobile crane simulator for training. The result of the implemented simulator is also presented and discussed.