[Opensim-dev] Help and Guidance!

[Umar Farooq]

Dear Justin,

Thanks for your reply and guidance!

I have noticed that load balancer project is not alive, and neither it
does similar stuff to ourselves, but it was good to learn from, being a
completely new one to the framework.

Thanks for mentioning the Intel work, of course that is important, for me
and met Dan in a workshop in TAIWAN. That's really good that everyone is
using OpenSim now.

I read the article how to overcome the issues with megaregions using OARs,
however, we will definitely require a framework for the remaining things
as you mentioned.

Thanks again for your positive and encouraging reply, hopefully, we would
be able to contribute something regarding our work. I will keep updating
about the project, and might be asking for further help if the community
don't mind. btw, do we have some published paper on OpenSim to use as a
reference in further publications?

Best wishes and have a good day.

Umar

> On 21/02/11 19:25, Umar Farooq wrote:
>> 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
>
> Hi Umar - great to hear about your project.  The load balancer project
> hasn't been maintained for many years old now and
> I suspect that the code is no longer operational.
>
> Much more recent work on performance topics has been done by Intel, though
> not all this work is currently not
> open-source afaik.  There is a selection of papers at
> http://techresearch.intel.com/ProjectDetails.aspx?Id=154.  But I'm
> sure that you're very well aware of those since I see both Intel folks and
> yourself presented at
> http://www.pap.vs.uni-due.de/MMVE10/
>
> Megaregions may well be a good place to start.  However, I believe there
> are teleporting and OAR loading issues with
> them.  However, these problems may not affect you.  I believe there are
> Google-able ways to load OARs on megaregions but
> it's not something that I've done myself.
>
> Without having read too closely, I would bet that you'll need additional
> framework and maybe generalization of existing
> components to do your work.  I would say that we're very happy to accept
> patches that make OpenSim more componentized
> and open to architectural experimentation.  Maintaining stability is also
> very good and for me personally, having
> patches that contribute automated tests that confirm this is even better.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> --
> Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
> http://justincc.org/blog
> http://twitter.com/justincc
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>


-- 
Umar Farooq

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

Cell: +4497853398184