This post was published 2 years 2 months 16 days ago and as such probably does not reflect my current opinions, knowledge or ability.If you’re reading this in a feed reader you’ll need to click through – slides are embedded in the post.
Today we were tasked with presenting our research topic to our lecturers and classmates. As you can see from the slides above, we were given only a short period of time, 3 minutes at most, to cover background information, our own solutions, and the significance of our work.
Since 3 of my slides comprised only images, here are some additional notes:
Simulate characters in a virtual environment
The simulation I will be considering and using to access my project is that of multiple autonomous characters navigating a virtual environment. They might perform multiple trivial tasks or be processed in different ways so as to create a situation involving task parallelism rather than data parallelism.
Distribute processing work
A central sever and database will be created, passing necessary data and information to other nodes. Each node will be assigned a part of the virtual environment and the characters with to process.
Balance workload
Rather than splitting virtual world space evenly between nodes, giving consideration to the spatial distribution of characters is an obvious improvement. Although using a quadtree (or other appropriate data structure) would facilitate partitioning the space based on population, it would be necessary to consider and perhaps attempt to reduce the overhead involved in moving characters between servers.
Following the presentation, I was asked two questions:
Obviously at some stage the overhead involved in adding additional nodes will outweigh the benefits of the additional processing power gained, how will this be taken into account?
Amdahl’s law can be used to determine the improvement expected from adding additional processors to a system and as such the theoretical maximum gain in performance, given the percentage of the program which must be processed in serial. While work can be done to minimise the amount of work which cannot be parallellised, it certainly can’t be removed completely and given the networking component of the system it will always be a major consideration.
Measured and theoretical results will be drawn upon in my dissertation to help reach conclusions about the success and future potential of the project.
Extensive processing of autonomous characters is a very different situation to the work required by a server for MMO games, how can this project relate to that?
There are large differences between the situation I hope to simulate and a game server, not having to deal with hundreds of client connections for example, however I believe they can easily be related and intend to demonstrate this in my dissertation. Most importantly the simulation involves processing a large volume of spatially distributed data, using multiple computers, subject to strict temporal constraints – very much in common with game related situations.