Postcards from Mars

This month brings new features and performance improvements. The migration to Vite is now complete, which has decreased startup time from around a minute to less than a second. A basic Kiosk mode is also now functional, and is being fine tuned.

Progress has been made on the Biosphere 2 simulation mode too, with new menus being developed such that a user can choose between whether they want to run a Mars simulation or a Biosphere 2 simulation, with corresponding visuals for each mode. New features are also being integrated into SIMOC’s model in order to account for factors that made the two Biosphere 2 experiments challenging, such as low light levels due to shadows cast by space frame and a year of heavy cloud cover in southern Arizona. The effect of pests and their role in the actual Biosphere 2 experiment are included, as well as a new agent to represent the concrete and associated carbon dioxide uptake.

Exciting new developments for SIMOC are underway. Research has started on implementing the agent based model to simulate Biosphere 2 itself, to replicate the original (1991-93) and second (1994) Biosphere 2 missions within SIMOC. A thorough literature review is being conducted by project lead Grant Hawkins with interviews being conducted with original Biosphere 2 crew members. Graphics are being designed in anticipation of the revised user interface.

Also, development is underway for a specially tailored SIMOC interface for use at exhibit kiosks. This streamlined version will have supplemental information, and automatically reset after periods of inactivity to make it more friendly for use at an exhibit where a person might interact with it briefly and then walk away without exiting the simulation.

Some new developments have been made for SIMOC Live. For example, a new configuration file facilitates major improvements in sensor behavior. Now sensors are automatically recognized when they are attached, and if disconnected the data capture will resume automatically when the connection is restored. There are also new options for exporting sensor data via the educational web dashboard.

SIMOC developers have also taken additional steps to improve performance. Data transmission from back-end to front-end has again been made more efficient. The frameworks and libraries used in the codebase have also been updated. For instance, ChartJS, SocketIO, and Vue have all been changed to the latest versions, and the developers have begun to migrate from Vuex to Pinia which should yield a performance increase.

The SIMOC development team has been hard at work improving the performance of SIMOC. Bugs that occurred when saving the game have been fixed in the latest code update, with a great many changes in the works to improve overall performance. In particular, performance due to many simultaneous instances of SIMOC are being addressed, for both cloud and local computing.

Core SIMOC developer Grant experimented with new ways to send batches of data and was able to achieve a 10x performance increase in performance. Lead SIMOC developer Ezio also found a way to cut load times in half. Ian has developed a test suite to stress test local and cloud servers, with an eye toward a return to locally managed servers for higher quality services. The development team also updated the Docker images on the backend to the latest version, and data logging has been improved.

Over the last few months, SIMOC developers have created features and interface improvements, with thorough tests in process. The SIMOC developer team is also working on the automation of startup scripts, and improving the appearance of charts as well as the variety of data that can be displayed on them.

With more than six months development effort by the core SIMOC development team Ezio, Grant, and Kai, working in parallel to the Arizona State University Computer Science Capstone team (Meridith, Greg, Ryan, David, and Ian) who are nearly complete with their effort to introduce live sensors feeds into a new SIMOC back-end (server) and modified front-end (web) interface for use at SAM and in classrooms worldwide!

The Phase V development of SIMOC (July 2021 – May 2022) introduces staggered crop rotation of food cultivars, a foundation for tracking food nutrition, advanced life cycle plant growth functions, the addition of random variation and total system entropy, and improved server-side management of agent definitions and data to provide a more dynamic, rich experience with even greater potential for non-linear outcomes and simulation of the real world.

With construction of the SAM Mars habitat analog at the iconic Biosphere 2, SIMOC now includes SAM Presets, a configuration of the SIMOC simulation that closely approximates the real-world SAM habitat. And with the newly introduced 3D objects during Configuration and on the Dashboard, the user can now visualize the habitat before and during the simulation, including SAM.

• Learn about all the improvements and updates at Phase V.
• First Time Users: Enjoy a quick introduction before you dive.
• Advanced Users: Learn how the SIMOC ABM functions, and how to analyze your data.
• If you are a returning user eager to try the new version, launch SIMOC now!