Efficient management of data center resources for massively multiplayer online games

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Efficient management of data center resources for massively multiplayer online games

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Conference on High Performance Networking and Computing archive
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing - Volume 00 table of contents

Austin, Texas

SECTION: Papers table of contents

Article No. 10

Year of Publication: 2008

ISBN:978-1-4244-2835-9

Authors

Vlad Nae	University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
Alexandru Iosup	Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Stefan Podlipnig	University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
Radu Prodan	University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
Dick Epema	Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Thomas Fahringer	University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

Publisher

IEEE Press Piscataway, NJ, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 26, Downloads (12 Months): 280, Citation Count: 1

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ABSTRACT

Today's Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) can include millions of concurrent players spread across the world. To keep these highly-interactive virtual environments online, a MMOG operator may need to provision tens of thousands of computing resources from various data centers. Faced with large resource demand variability, and with misfit resource renting policies, the current industry practice is to maintain for each game tens of self-owned data centers. In this work we investigate the dynamic resource provisioning from external data centers for MMOG operation. We introduce a novel MMOG workload model that represents the dynamics of both the player population and the player interactions. We evaluate several algorithms, including a novel neural network predictor, for predicting the resource demand. Using trace-based simulation, we evaluate the impact of the data center policies on the resource provisioning efficiency; we show that dynamic provisioning can be much more efficient than its static alternative.

REFERENCES

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