[Opensim-dev] Help and Guidance!

[Umar Farooq]

Dear All,

Hope you all are good today!

I am a PhD student at the University of East Anglia Norwich, and working
on dynamic load distribution for achieving scalable and consistent virtual
worlds. First, of all thanks for all the hard work this community is doing
for making OpenSimulator a reality as an open source framework. We have
conducted a survey of the open source frameworks and found that
OpenSimulator is the best choice for the implementation of our work. I am
studying the Load Balancer project that was initiated by Mike Mazur et al,
but we believe in a world without game specific concepts. We (I and my
Supervisor) are keen to start a project for the dynamic distribution of
load, using the basic framework and additional work of this community for
our work that is described below:

Project Description: We have developed and simulated a number of
strategies and algorithms that dynamically distributes current load of a
server in to a number of smaller sub-regions (either 4 or 9 based on the
avatar placement).  We use an aggregation algorithm to get two contiguous
areas, to avoid resource under-utilisation. This is because some regions
might have no players at all. We delegate one aggregate to a new server
while keeping the other with the current server.  The newly selected
server becomes child of the server that initiated splitting.  Later on, if
the capacity further increases, sub-regions in megaregions are assigned to
other servers. However, the levels in the Resource Management Tree are
kept at minimum by making parent server based on split and not only
assignment.  The project aims achieving scalability by physical partition
of the world maintaining the world in a hierarchical fashion, and Time
Management in a decentralised manner considering only adjacent regions
sharing physical boundaries (based on inherent properties of virtual
worlds). We have identified and simulated this work with a number of
simple scenarios.

What we think:
1.	Using a megaregion initially and then splitting it into two different
megaregions, delegating one to a new server that becomes child of the
first server.
2.	Using OAR files to store the contents and load it one by one in a
megaregion on the new server.
3.	Using serialization concept to transfer the avatars of the regions just
moved to a new server.

We would be great, if this community help us identify the components
already developed that might help us and give me a proper direction to
start with this work (that might be an extended project of Region
Modules). We are committed to contribute to this community and continue
this work beyond my PhD work. Thanks a lot for your help and support.
Best wishes and hope to hear from some you about this proposal.

Umar



-- 
Umar Farooq

Research Scholar,
Virtual Humans Group,
School of Computing Sciences,
University of East Anglia,
Norwich, United Kingdom.

Cell: +4497853398184