Xenoservers: Accountable Execution of Untrusted Programs
HOTOS '99 Proceedings of the The Seventh Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
On demand platform for online games
IBM Systems Journal
Designing Virtual Worlds
Proactive fault tolerance for HPC with Xen virtualization
Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Supercomputing
RTF: a real-time framework for developing scalable multiplayer online games
Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Amazon S3 for science grids: a viable solution?
DADC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Data-aware distributed computing
On the dynamic resource availability in grids
GRID '07 Proceedings of the 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing
Robust resource allocation in a massive multiplayer online gaming environment
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games
Prediction-based real-time resource provisioning for massively multiplayer online games
Future Generation Computer Systems
Geelix LiveGames: remote playing of video games
CCNC'09 Proceedings of the 6th IEEE Conference on Consumer Communications and Networking Conference
Is Server Consolidation Beneficial to MMORPG? A Case Study of World of Warcraft
CLOUD '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing
International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication
A Large-Scale Study of Failures in High-Performance Computing Systems
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
Dynamic Resource Provisioning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
A new business model for massively multiplayer online games
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance engineering
Securing the Cloud: Cloud Computer Security Techniques and Tactics
Securing the Cloud: Cloud Computer Security Techniques and Tactics
Modeling machine availability in enterprise and wide-area distributed computing environments
Euro-Par'05 Proceedings of the 11th international Euro-Par conference on Parallel Processing
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Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are a new type of large-scale distributed applications characterised by seamless virtual worlds in which millions of world-wide players act and interact in real-time. Although for the past decade the number of MMOG players has grown exponentially, to the current tens of millions, this very growth may now hamper the progress of this important branch of the entertainment business. To guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) to a highly variable number of concurrent users, operators statically over-provision a large infrastructure capable of sustaining the game peak load, even though a large portion of the resources is unused most of the time. To address this problem, we propose a Cloud middleware-based system for autonomous operation of MMOGs. Our system provisions resources on-demand from multiple Cloud providers, automatically distributes the MMOG load between these resources, and self-heals when confronted with unforeseen resource failures. This new operational model allows small and medium enterprises to join the competitive MMOG market through near-zero initial infrastructure investment and operate MMOGs at given levels of QoS with small human intervention. We evaluate through simulations based on real-life MMOG traces the impact of resource availability on the QoS offered to the MMOG clients. We find that: (1) our proposed MMOG operation system can mitigate the negative effects of resource failures in under four minutes, (2) MMOG server consolidation in a resource-scarce environment can accentuate the negative effects of resource failures, and (3) the competition for resources can indirectly affect the QoS of the MMOG sessions.