A Systematic Mapping Study of MMOG Backend Architectures

The advent of utility computing has revolutionized almost every sector of traditional software development. Especially commercial cloud computing services, pioneered by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, have provided an unprecedented opportunity for the fast and sustainable development of complex distributed systems. Nevertheless, existing models and tools aim primarily for systems where resource usage—by humans and bots alike—is logically and physically quite disperse resulting in a low likelihood of conflicting resource access. However, a number of resource-intensive applications, such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and large-scale simulations introduce a requirement for a very large common state with many actors accessing it simultaneously and thus a high likelihood of conflicting resource access. This paper presents a systematic mapping study of the state-of-the-art in software technology aiming explicitly to support the development of MMOGs, a class of large-scale, resource-intensive software systems.By examining the main focus of a diverse set of related publications, we identify a list of criteria that are important for MMOG development. Then, we categorize the selected studies based on the inferred criteria in order to compare their approach, unveil the challenges faced in each of them and reveal research trends that might be present. Finally we attempt to identify research directions which appear promising for enabling the use of standardized technology for this class of systems

Algorithmes de gestion de ressources dans une infrastructure de virtualisation de services de jeux vidéo

Depuis sa création, l’industrie du jeu vidéo a connu une effervescence sans précédent en dépassant celle du cinéma. Bien que centrée autour d’un objectif ludique, elle s’étend également à l’apprentissage. D’autre part, depuis quelques années, un nouveau paradigme nommé cloud computing (infonuage) révolutionne la façon dont les entreprises et particuliers accèdent à des ressources informatiques telles que de la puissance de calcul ou de la capacité de stockage. Adoptant une approche élastique d’utilisation à la demande, le cloud computing est une solution très intéressante pour l’externalisation et la simplification des services informatiques. Le cloud computing a d’ailleurs été adapté au jeu vidéo sous le nom de cloud gaming. Son objectif est de permettre à des clients ayant un accès à Internet de jouer à des jeux vidéo exigeants en ressources sur des terminaux à faible consommation, comme les téléphones intelligents ou encore les tablettes. L’idée est que les actions des joueurs sont transmises à des serveurs de traitement distants situés dans le cloud, qui transmettent en retour un flux vidéo et audio. De nos jours, la plupart des études visent à améliorer la qualité de service du cloud gaming, encore pénalisé par la latence des réseaux. Malheureusement, très peu de travaux visent à proposer des innovations au niveau de l’architecture du cloud gaming. Ce mémoire présente deux contributions majeures. La première est une architecture distribuée innovante, où les modules d’un jeu sont séparés en substrates, petites briques logicielles spécialisées, dotées d’interfaces et capables d’accomplir un ensemble de tâches. Cette architecture introduit un nouveau modèle d’affaires puisque les substrates sont hébergés et fournis par des substrates providers. La seconde contribution est la conception d’un algorithme de gestion de ressources pour les infrastructures de virtualisation de jeux vidéo orientés substrates, afin de conserver une certaine qualité de service

Functional programming languages in computing clouds: practical and theoretical explorations

Cloud platforms must integrate three pillars: messaging, coordination of workers and data. This research investigates whether functional programming languages have any special merit when it comes to the implementation of cloud computing platforms. This thesis presents the lightweight message queue CMQ and the DSL CWMWL for the coordination of workers that we use as artefact to proof or disproof the special merit of functional programming languages in computing clouds. We have detailed the design and implementation with the broad aim to match the notions and the requirements of computing clouds. Our approach to evaluate these aims is based on evaluation criteria that are based on a series of comprehensive rationales and specifics that allow the FPL Haskell to be thoroughly analysed. We find that Haskell is excellent for use cases that do not require the distribution of the application across the boundaries of (physical or virtual) systems, but not appropriate as a whole for the development of distributed cloud based workloads that require communication with the far side and coordination of decoupled workloads. However, Haskell may be able to qualify as a suitable vehicle in the future with future developments of formal mechanisms that embrace non-determinism in the underlying distributed environments leading to applications that are anti-fragile rather than applications that insist on strict determinism that can only be guaranteed on the local system or via slow blocking communication mechanisms

The Impact of Virtualization on the Performance of Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Abstract—Today’s highly successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have millions of registered users and hundreds of thousands of active concurrent users. As a result of the highly dynamic MMOG usage patterns, the MMOG operators pre-provision and then maintain throughout the lifetime of the game tens of thousands of compute resources in data centers located across the world. Until recently, the difficulty of porting the MMOG software services to different platforms made it impractical to dynamically provision resources external to the MMOG operators ’ data centers. However, virtualization is a new technology that promises to alleviate this problem by providing a uniform computing platform with minimal overhead. To investigate the potential of this new technology, in this paper we propose a new hybrid resource provisioning model that uses a smaller and less expensive set of self-owned data centers, complemented by virtualized cloud computing resources during peak hours. Using real traces from RuneScape, one of the most successful contemporary MMOGs, we evaluate with simulations the effectiveness of the on-demand cloud resource provisioning strategy for MMOGs. We assess the impact of provisioning of virtualized cloud resources, analyze the components of virtualization overhead, and compare provisioning of virtualized resources with direct provisioning of data center resources. I