Research area
Cloud Computing, Social Gaming Systems
Abstract
Hundreds of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) entertain over 250,000,000 online gamers in a maturing global market of over 7 billion Euros. In the Netherlands, gaming revenues exceed those of the film industry since 2007. To maintain competitiveness in games played over the Internet, Dutch studios (employing 1,500 developers) rely on innovation and advanced analysis of gamer profiles.
The exponential growth of the gaming community since 1998 means that resource and cost scalability is the biggest challenge of MMOGs. Faced with the Quality-of-Service constraints imposed by gamers, the current industry approach is to operate large-scale infrastructures. Resource-wise this approach is un-scalable for player surges, and cost-wise it blocks market access to amateur and small game developers as it requires millions of Euros of initial (risky) investment. Thus, Dutch companies such as Khaeon are unable to capitalize on their innovative game designs and sell at-loss their services to larger (foreign) companies, forfeiting major operational benefits.
To overcome the scalability barriers, we will study a new fabric for small gaming studios that leverages cloud computing resources. Game operators can lease resources from commercial clouds and add them to their infrastructure on-demand-exclusively when, where, and for how long needed; cloud operators can consolidate MMOG and other workloads to gain economies-of-scale and focus expertise. The use of clouds raises numerous distributed systems challenges; for example, variability in MMOG workload and cloud resource performance can incur, when unaccounted for, orders-of-magnitude higher operational costs. We will investigate and demonstrate three innovations: (i) quantifying the complete MMOG environment, including player-virtual world interaction and cloud performance variability; (ii) devising variability-aware mechanisms for efficient MMOG resource provisioning and allocation; (iii) exploiting the interplay between virtual worlds and analytics in MMOG workloads. This work also benefits the design of collaborative and interactive applications in scientific/commercial domains.
Time frame
2011-2015
Funding
250 kEURO, NWO/STW
Project web page
People involved
Alexandru Iosup, Assistant Professor