Open Source, Systems, Standards, and Content

Jeffrey Wallace, Ph.D., Continuous Transformation Environment Laboratories Mark Visco, Analytical Graphics, Inc.

Defense Industry Workshop: Strengthen DoD Stewardship and Application of M&S

April 17, 2014, 8:15 am to 12:15 pm

Central ideas

Open Source and Content: When Does It Work? Open Systems and Standards Examples and Evidence

Geospatial Visualization Hadoop/Map Reduce Accumulo MongoDB Open Scene Graph MakeHuman Flight Gear

Opportunity Implementation Way Ahead

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Open Source and Content When Does It Work?

A community, organizations and individuals, decides to collectively solve a problem There has to be a viable economic model enabling the community Many of the successful open source efforts evolve related commercial variants or compliant components and tools An organized approach has to evolve from the community

Requirements/Management Configuration Management Development Testing Release Support

Open Systems and Standards When Does It Work?

There must be an economically viable reason to open up access to a system (Open Systems) There must be an economically viable reason to comply with a standard

The implementation must not be a high economic barrier to entry (otherwise you have merely created a cartel) And sustainability…

In most cases an organization must evolve and sustain itself to:

Specify the interface or standard Manage versioning and release of the specification documentation

Examples

Geospatial Visualization Hadoop/Map Reduce Accumulo MongoDB Open Scene Graph MakeHuman Flight Gear

The benefits of cloud computing, advanced analytics, and big data are all around us

At the foundation are infrastructure pieces that enable economic ecosystems Yahoo led the way by creating an open source approximation of Google’s core infrastructure (Hadoop/MapReduce)

A commercial variant powers Walmart and American Express, among others

Over 60% of the world’s websites are running the open source Apache webserver

That is great, why does someone use something different? What do they use? The commercial versions have to comply with open syandards and support certain open interfaces

Evidence – supporting facts for their advocacy

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Webserver Usage

The opportunity has tremendous upside – improve the product in a revolutionary way, lower the cost, and speed delivery The cost is likely just a reprogramming of existing resources

Obviously this will not be easy, but it might also be obvious once you look at it

The benefit would be to actually enable all the different elements of the government that could use modeling and simulation to do so in a way that optimizes scare resources

What is opportunity to the Enterprise – what is the Cost/benefit?

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In a public-private partnership way: Get a list (by funding) of the top XX M&S users in government and industry

Identifies the mass of economic ecosystem and gives you an idea of the true size Not all economic theories are valid at all sizes of ecosystems

Understand infrastructure requirements and areas where efforts could collaborate Understand where existing open source opportunities lie

Are there any government funded efforts that should convert to open source? How would that work? Anything that should be started as a new open source system with seed funding?

Do Not Get Lost In Meetings Just Do It (Something)

How would you implement this?

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The way ahead

M&SCO should host an industry day(maybe a day and a half)

Identify the ecosystem as it exists Engage the community about how to:

Define an M&S Enterprise Describe the M&S infrastructure universe Identify open source, systems, standards, and content opportunities going forward

Coalesce a group of key government stakeholders to mentor the process and support M&SCO

Create a new roadmap Own the execution as part of stakeholder mission success

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Questions

Comments and Questions from the Panels?