GPGPU for cheaper 3D MMO servers

Authors:
Asavei Victor;Moldoveanu Alin Dragos Bogdan;Moldoveanu Florica;Morar Anca;Egner Alexandru
Affiliations:
Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University "POLITEHNICA" of Bucharest, Bucuresti, Romania;Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University "POLITEHNICA" of Bucharest, Bucuresti, Romania;Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University "POLITEHNICA" of Bucharest, Bucuresti, Romania;Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University "POLITEHNICA" of Bucharest, Bucuresti, Romania;Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University "POLITEHNICA" of Bucharest, Bucuresti, Romania
Venue:
TELE-INFO'10 Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS international conference on Telecommunications and informatics
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) applications have become extremely popular in the last years and this has led to an increase in the numbers of users that 3D MMO servers need to cope with. The current Client-Server architecture that is used by the majority of MMOs introduces a severe bottleneck regarding the performance and scalability of the virtual spaces. In order to achieve the necessary level of performance for the 3D MMO servers the operators of such virtual worlds are faced with a high financial cost to maintain the system infrastructure. In this paper we describe the challenges that 3D MMO servers face, analyze the general architecture of 3D MMO servers, identify key operation that can be optimized as GPGPU (General Purpose computation on Graphical Processing Units) programs and propose adaptations for the server architecture to run GPGPU tasks. The tests that we have conducted using a prototype implementation have shown encouraging results proving that it is feasible for a 3D MMO server to offload tasks as GPGPU programs and thus reducing the overall costs.