Enhancing grids for massively multiplayer online computer games

Abstract

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) are an innovative and challenging class of applications for Grid computing that require large amounts of computational resources for providing a responsive and scalable gameplay for concurrently participating players connected via Internet. We present our Real-Time Framework (RTF) - a Grid-based middleware for scaling game sessions through a variety of parallelization and distribution techniques. RTF is described within a novel multi-layer service-oriented architecture that comprises three advanced services - monitoring, capacity planning, and runtime steering - that use the potential of Grid computing to provide pervasive access to a potentially unbounded number of resources. We report experimental results on the quality of our capacity planning and scalability of the RTF distribution mechanism. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.