Fortran90 High Level Architecture Library (libF90HLA)
C. Stenzel, S. Pawletta
February 2008
Abstract
The F90HLA library is developed through the research group Computational Engineering and Automation at the University of Wismar. It provides HLA connectivity within Fortran90 under Linux and Windows. Besides the GNU Compiler Suite also the Intel Compiler is supported. The current toolbox supports the HLA standard 1.3. It is licensed under the LPGL, the additional demos are licensed under the GPL. The recommended Runtime Infrastructure (RTI) is ONERA CERTI. The development takes place on the ONERA CERTI development web site at Savannah.
Introduction
The High Level Architecture (HLA) is a standard for distributed simulation. Invented and developed by the American Department of Defense HLA arised to the first IEEE standard for distributed simulation in september 2000. The middleware providing HLA services is called Runtime Infrastructure (RTI).
Today different commercial and non-commercial RTI implementations exist. All of these implementations provide an API to C++ and/or Java conform to the interface specification of the HLA standard. This absolutely fulfills the requirements of the military domain where most of the simulations are coded in object-oriented programming languages like C++ or Java.
In the civilian domain simulations are created with the help of so-called Commercial of the Shelf Simulation Packages (COTSSP). HLA integration is not widely provided by today's COTSSP.
Simulation model design and execution in the engineering and scientific domain are often characterized by the usage of Scientific and technical Computation Environments (SCE) like Matlab, a famous commercial SCE. Other free SCEs already exist like Octave or Scilab. These systems replaces more and more the traditional Fortran coding. But existing Fortran programs are daily used througout the scientific and engineering community. Especially for the supercomputing community Fortran is still today the primary programming language.
In respect of the increasing importance of HLA there is a need to provide engineers a native HLA interface in their "daily working environments". This approach promises to reduce the effort for applying HLA in the engineering community to a minimum.
The F90HLA library closes this gap for Fortran. The related software project MatlabHLA of the research group CEA provides an HLA interface within Matlab (MatlabHLA-Toolbox).
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