Linux Journal
Cluster reserves: a mechanism for resource management in cluster-based network servers
Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games
Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games
Statistical service assurances for applications in utility grid environments
Performance Evaluation - Special issue: Distributed systems performance
Dynamic placement for clustered web applications
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
System-performance modeling for massively multiplayer online role-playing games
IBM Systems Journal
Grid capacity planning with negotiation-based advance reservation for optimized QoS
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Designing Virtual Worlds
Amazon S3 for science grids: a viable solution?
DADC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Data-aware distributed computing
Inter-operating grids through Delegated MatchMaking
Scientific Programming - Large-Scale Programming Tools and Environments
The definitive guide to the xen hypervisor
The definitive guide to the xen hypervisor
Efficient management of data center resources for massively multiplayer online games
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Dynamic load management for MMOGs in distributed environments
Proceedings of the 7th ACM international conference on Computing frontiers
International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication
A new business model for massively multiplayer online games
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance engineering
A dynamic resource management system for real-time online applications on clouds
Euro-Par'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Parallel Processing
Performance evaluation of video-on-demand in virtualized environments: the client perspective
Proceedings of the 6th international workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing Date
Massively multiplayer online games on unreliable resources
Proceedings of the 11th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
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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.