Use the Umbra Framework to Create Your Own Applications
When customers wish to develop applications in Umbra themselves, we can provide the Umbra Simulation Framework directly to them. Umbra is available by license and is free for U.S. government agencies and sometimes to those under contract with the U.S. Government. It has been distributed to universities and some industry partners; however, Umbra is export controlled. Deliverables usually include Umbra, and training is often required to bring customers up to speed. If needed, we can also provide consulting or co-development of some parts of the Umbra effort to ensure customer success. Support is provided through updates, bug reporting, and user group community activities. See the Contact page for more about this support. Sandia is not mission-funded to support Umbra, so any significant support usually requires funding.
You might consider these concepts when thinking about value of Umbra for your application:
- Past application emphasis and capability:
- Umbra is a great integration framework that can effectively tie together other tools and hardware systems.
- Sandia’s focus and emphasis for Umbra has been on precision analysis issues over visual beauty, although visual reality can be incorporated if needed.
- Umbra has introspective abilities during simulation execution.
- Umbra is both a time-stepped and event driven simulation.
- Umbra allows Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC) applications.
- Umbra can support co-simulation or federation (HLA, DIS, TENA).
- Umbra is not a game engine, but can work with some game engines.
- Umbra has modeled vehicles (ground, sea, air), sensors, buildings (exterior/interior), humans, communications, physical-cyber effects, viewsheds, and weapons.
- Terrain/environments that are small to 100s of square Kilometers
- Applications that may be well suited to Umbra:
- Where you wish to spend time solving your problem, not building a framework.
- Umbra is a complex adaptive systems (CASoS) engineering and analysis tool.
- Embodied agent systems – those where the environment of the agent is key to mission or operations.
- Dante tool applications
- OpShed tool applications
- Robotics
- Applications where quick tactical (weeks-months) simulation development is key and changes to those simulations is important (hours-days)
- Applications that may not be optimal to fully render in Umbra:
- Light-weight large-scale agent-based modeling
- Particle/fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, or other high performance computing applications
- Computing environment:
- Umbra is a C++ environment, C# for GUI, Tkl.
- Umbra has 32-bit and 64-bit builds.
- Umbra works on laptops, desktops, through clusters.
- Umbra is primarily supported on PC platforms, but also works on Linux and MAC platforms.
- Supports parallel distributed processing
- Increasing level of multi-threaded code and GPU support
- Documentation & Training:
- Documentation for Umbra is not yet formalized
- Multiple training classes exist for Umbra
- Umbra is not shrink-wrapped software
- Use & Licensing:
- Umbra is export controlled, EAR99.
- Umbra is "free" for U.S. Government use, sometimes including those under contract with the U.S. Government.
- Umbra is licensable to universities and industry.