Patent attributes
An invention is provided to efficiently create, deploy and conduct highly realistic and interactive cyber simulation exercises. In the invention, a collection of virtual machines and associated resources (such as compute, storage, and networking) can be modified by a simulation author by adding components and/or executing actions that will make up stage(s) in each exercise(s) required by a simulation, where a simulation is a collection of exercises and stages. When saved, a stage becomes part of an exercise and can be deployed to a workspace. Participants in the simulation use the workspace to achieve a mission associated with each stage. The invention uses replicas of real life computing environments, where these replicas are adapted for participant interaction, and where these replicas comprise logical elements such as startup sequences of individual components. The invention can also provide features such as zero overhead data copy (ZODC) and/or parallelized data ingestion.
