As my laptop decided to fail quite catastrophically the day after I handed in my honours project (just luck it didn’t do so before, really) I realise I haven’t updated the blog in some time. I’ll post results and likely also the written work and source code when I have my own laptop back again, but for now here are some images to show how the project ended.
The larger square shows the total area of the small virtual world. Each smaller square represents a microcell, an area of the world to be assigned to and updated by a single worker node. The worker nodes are shown by the three colours in the images below, which are each viewed from the central server. The simulation was run for a number of minutes, with cells being redistributed dynamically between nodes. Numbers at the bottom right indicate the number of minutes the system had been active for when the screenshot was captured.
This image shows the view from a worker node, each blue dot represents a single entity following a path. This node is completely under-loaded just so that the entities can be seen clearly, when thousands are processed it can be hard to pick out individuals.
This shows the use of varying microcell sizes. The use of different sizes didn’t actually make a difference to average load, maximum load or load disparity between worker nodes except when particularly small cells were used. This caused a great deal of load for the central server, a huge increase in the number of transfers required and as the images show prevent the world from being re-partitioned in a reasonable period of time.
Finally, this image shows the cell distribution between worker nodes when the number used was scaled to match the problem size. As the number of entities was increased and then decreased, the number of computers used was scaled similarly.
That’s all for now, I’ll do my best to go over some details when my laptop has been repaired.