[Opensim-users] client-side NPC cluster load balancing Java

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Ovi,

Thanks for sharing this with us!

A very interesting approach indeed, and fascinating reading for someone
like me who is dabbling with autonomous agents in OpenSimulator as well.
Now I know what to do when my own setup starts crawling with agents and my
poor underpowered servers cannot keep up with the load!

I haven't seen the code myself, but read your paper. I understand that
Midwife assumes (you use the expression "naively") that all servers will
reside in the same network, and that all systems on that network will host
Midwife instances. This is good enough for a lab environment, but I can
guess that this list could be either hard-coded or obtained in a different
manner? I'm thinking of a model where the software driving autonomous
agents (and the accompanying Midwife application) might be launched
on-demand on a cloud (as demand grows), where IP addresses are not known
beforehand, and (depending on the cloud operator!) might not be all in the
same subnet. I'm just curious, what approach would work best in such a
scenario? The elegance of the Midwife solution you present is that it
doesn't require a "master controller" (which would be a bottleneck!); on a
scenario where Midwife instances are not known beforehand, what solution
would be best?

Mind you, I'm just curious if you gave some thoughts to that (perhaps it's
something you're working on for revision 0.3!). Your work stands out by
itself, it doesn't need "improvements". Congratulations!

And please let us know when that article gets published :-)

Cheers and sorry to the rest of the users here if somehow this message is
not "fitting" into the spirit of this mailing list.

   - Gwyn


> On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 8:45 AM, Ovi Chris Rouly <maelzel at ieee.org> wrote:
>
>> Folks,
>>
>> May I humbly offer to my OS-user colleagues who run scalable-sized groups
>> of autonomous and adaptive client-side agents (NPC 'bots and Virtual
>> Agents), some Java source code that may help balance the computational load
>> (of those NPCs) across a private compute cluster?
>>
>> http://www.maelzel.com/source/Midwife_(rev_0.2).zip
>>
>> And, while this is premature, may I also offer the accompanying paper
>> describing the inner workings of the code, the purpose of the algorithm in
>> its historical context, and my personal use of the code as:
>>
>> Title: Midwife: CPU cluster load distribution of Virtual Agent AIs
>> http://css.gmu.edu/papers/Rouly%2C%202014a.pdf
>>
>> Respectfully,
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> Dept. of Cmp. Soc. Sci.
>> George Mason Univ.
>>
>
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