A Service Platform for On-Line Games

Debanjan Saha, Sambit Sahu, Anees Shaikh

Presented by Gary Huang

Paper Summary

FPS and MMORPG games require a significant amount of computing and networking resources, and are hosted on individual servers with virtually no global management.  These result in a fragmented gaming community with no guarantees on server or network performance and often lead to poor game-playing experience.

Thus, the paper proposed to use on-demand grid technology as the underlying infrastructure for hosting on-line games.  The grid technology provides a standards-based platform well-suited for such an on-demand computing infrastructure.  In addition, a grid-based shared infrastructure provides economies of scale, industrial scale resiliency, and necessary prerequisites for a successful on-line gaming industry.

The gaming grid platform consists of a number of server clusters located in geographically distributed data centers, which are connected to the Internet via one or more ISPs.  The federation of server clusters is a resource shared across a number of game publishers and used to host different games.  There are three middleware services (player services, game publisher services, and system services) that comprise the game hosting platform, to hide the complexity of managing this shared grid infrastructure from the publishers and players of on-line games.  The current grid standard is the Globus Toolkit 2.2.

Discussion Summary

Here are some points discussed in the class:

1) Is Globus Toolkit the software for middleware services?

No quite right.  Globus Toolkit is an open source software project which provides a number of component services in the areas of resource management, information services, and data management.  The version 2 of Globus Toolkit is considered as the standard grid implementation.

2) Is Grid Infrastructure a generic and popular architecture?

Yes, the grid infrastructure is a generic and popular gaming architecture to intelligently allocate computing resources, optimize server utilization while maximizing game playing satisfaction, and provide economies of scale. 

3) How does the gaming grid infrastructure properly allocate resources to players?

Since a given publisher may have server resources allocated at different clusters in order to handle players located in different geographic locations.  And the allocation of server resources may change over time as the number and distribution of players change.  So the grid infrastructure can dynamically allocate resources to the players in the whole system.  

Presentation Slides

Here is the link for a PowerPoint file < GameServicePlatform.ppt >