Download it here! Tarred and gzipped file.
Boxed-sim is a program that simulates some number of polyhedral approximated balls bouncing around inside a box. It was originally developed to examine the scalability of the particular rigid-body simulation algorithm that it uses, but has since seen some use as a heap-intensive program for other areas of systems research. I'm making it available as a general resource, although I make absolutely no claim that it is representative of anything other than rigid body simulation algorithms.
To compile, type make. It doesn't use any particularly special include files or libraries. There might be some system calls that are not standard across all UNIX or Windows environments, but there ultimately isn't anything too strange in there.
To run, type "boxed -n <num> -s <seed>", replacing <num> with the number of balls you wish to simulate, and <seed> with the random seed. You don't have to specify the random seed - it will default to the current time. It is there as a command line argument for repeatability. You must specify the number of balls. More balls means more memory and slower running times.
The main() function is in boxed.c. There is some code in there for getting the output of the simulation (positions of all the balls every 30th of a second). It produces lots and lots of output. There is also the virtual run-time of the simulation, which can be adjusted to adjust the actual run-time of the algorithm.
There are apparently some minor bugs, such as uninitialized data reads. If someone tells me precisely where they are then I will fix them. Someone might also like to run it through purify or another memory checking program.
Since this program has been used for experiments with heap management and other memory related issues, I'll say a little about its memory usage. It allocates additional heap space as it needs it, but it never (?) frees heap memory. Instead, it maintains internal free lists for all the frequently allocated/deallocated structures, and allocates from these before going to the heap for more. Apart from that, I can't say much. It's memory usage has not been optimized in any way, which is maybe why people use it in experiments.
If you use this in your work, I would like to put a link to it here. So please email me.
Stephen Chenney
University of Wisconsin at Madison
schenney@acm.org
Last Modified: Tue Feb 13 17:54:51 CST 2001