Contrasting characteristics and cache performance of technical and multi-user commercial workloads
ASPLOS VI Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Memory system characterization of commercial workloads
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Performance of database workloads on shared-memory systems with out-of-order processors
Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Performance of image and video processing with general-purpose processors and media ISA extensions
ISCA '99 Proceedings of the 26th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Real-Time Parallel MPEG-2 Decoding in Software
IPPS '97 Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Parallel Processing
DBMSs on a Modern Processor: Where Does Time Go?
VLDB '99 Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
The Memory Performance of DSS Commercial Workloads in Shared-Memory Multiprocessors
HPCA '97 Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Efficient operating system support for group unicast
NOSSDAV '05 Proceedings of the international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
Greedy Algorithms for Client Assignment in Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation
A two-phase approach to interactivity enhancement for large-scale distributed virtual environments
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
Client assignment problem in distributed virtual environments
International Journal of Computers and Applications
Transactional memory support for scalable and transparent parallelization of multiplayer games
Proceedings of the 5th European conference on Computer systems
Efficient client-to-server assignments for distributed virtual environments
IPDPS'06 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Parallel and distributed processing
Client allocation for enhancing interactivity in distributed virtual environments
ICCSA'05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Computational Science and its Applications - Volume Part I
A demonstration of a lockless, relaxed atomicity state parallel game server (LEARS)
Proceedings of the 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
Load balancing on an interactive multiplayer game server
Euro-Par'07 Proceedings of the 13th international Euro-Par conference on Parallel Processing
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With the recent explosion in deployment of services to large numbers of customers over the Internet and in global services in general, issues related to the architecture of scalable servers are becoming increasingly important. However, our understanding of these types of applications is currently limited, especially on how well they scale to support large numbers of users. One such, novel, commercial class of applications, are interactive, multi-player game servers. Multi-player games are both an important class of commercial applications (in the entertainment industry) and they can be valuable in understanding the architectural requirements of scalable services. They impose requirements on system performance, scalability, and availability, stressing multiple aspects of the system architecture (e.g., compute cycles and network I/O). Recently there has been a lot of interest on client side issues with respect to games. However, there has been little or no work on the server side. In this paper we use a commercial game server to gain insight in this class of applications and the requirements they impose on modern architectures. We find that: (1) In terms of the benchmarking methodology, interactive game servers are very different from scientific workloads. We propose a methodology that deals with the related issues in benchmarking this class of applications. Our methodology bears many similarities with methodologies used in benchmarking online transaction processing (OLTP) systems. (2) Current, sequential game servers can support at most up to a few tens of users (60–100) on existing processors. (3) The bottleneck in the server is both game-related as well as network-related processing (about 50–50). (4) Network bandwidth requirements are not an important issue for the numbers of players we are interested in. (5) The processor achieves a surprisingly low IPC of 0.416.