  Autonomous vehicle safety and reliability are the paramount requirements when
developing autonomous vehicles. These requirements are guaranteed by massive
functional and performance tests. Conducting these tests on real vehicles is
extremely expensive and time consuming, and thus it is imperative to develop a
simulation platform to perform these tasks. For simulation, we can utilize the
Robot Operating System (ROS) for data playback to test newly developed
algorithms. However, due to the massive amount of simulation data, performing
simulation on single machines is not practical. Hence, a high-performance
distributed simulation platform is a critical piece in autonomous driving
development. In this paper we present our experiences of building a production
distributed autonomous driving simulation platform. This platform is built upon
Spark distributed framework, for distributed computing management, and ROS, for
data playback simulations.
