An architecture supporting large scale MMOGs

The growing popularity of large-scale, highly interactive virtual reality systems such as massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) necessitates highly robust and efficient architectures. Distributed implementations are common, but they must deal with challenges such as supporting very large numbers of closely interacting users, the need to maintain robustness in the face of hardware failure, balancing the processing load, reducing user latency, and minimizing thrashing effects caused by movement between servers. Although a number of existing techniques address each of these independently, there are no unified methods that attack these problems cohesively.

We present methods to simultaneously address these critical challenges---a novel approach and associated software design intended for distributed high performance computing facilities in which the world is divided into a regular lattice of overlapping cells (providing redundancy), which are dynamically assigned to servers within the High Performance Computing (HPC) (facilitating load balancing). We believe this architecture can be applied to non-spatial cells. This architecture is currently being implemented in a test bed for further experimentation.