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[Ainulindale-devel] Scavenged resources: CPU
From: |
Andrea Negro |
Subject: |
[Ainulindale-devel] Scavenged resources: CPU |
Date: |
Sun, 25 May 2003 14:57:07 +0200 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.5 |
Just to fix and hear ideas about that.
If a user allows it, a computer connecting to the grid is actually 'donating'
resources to the grid itself: this is why such clients (which may or may not
be also 'playing clients) are called 'donor'.
Resources means everything you can think about: mainly, cpu cycles and disk
space, but also bandwidth or special hardware.
I was thinking about how to manage this resources. Disk space, for instance,
could be used for data replication, backup or distributed storage, but this
part is not completely clear to me right now.
I was thinking about the cpu resource instead. This is simpler to think about:
think about the Seti at Home, its concept is quite understandable.
I see three uses of cpu resources donated to Ainulindale by now:
1) to run NPC remotely, thus not having to use gaming site resources to handle
complex AI of particular NPC. This is quite simple to think about, as a NPC
is actually the same as a PC, so why do not use the same physical location af
a regular user? The only raised concern is about the security, or techniques
to avoid hacking code which is running on your machine to have advantages in
the game. Ideas about that?
2) to perform world's simulations. Derfel and me are thinking about use of
particular algorithms which should perform an autonomic simulation of the
world. Fro example, algorithms could provide means to create a wheather in a
more realistic way than just having random weather, or to manage the number
of elements of a specie, eg rabbits or cows. This way the world should run
and change by itself. For example, and area builder could simply put seeds of
trees, and the world takes care on run to have the trees to grow. Of course,
this is something that in a regular mud or mmorpg is useless, because it
requires a lot of computational power to develop, and an approximation is
always appropriate. But I think this is possible in Ainulindale, because all
we have to do is to setup the base rules, and to define that the level of
simulation accuracy should depend on the quantity of scavenged cpu available.
The more computers donate cpu cycles to the world, the more accurate the
simpulation become. I can see a key element here, we could think about it as
a sort of 'world scheduler', or 'autonomic events scheduler', or 'nature
scheduler', or 'simulation scheduler'... suggestions? :)
3) to perform accurte renderings via povray. To perform complex scene
rendering in povray over a grid could be rahter simple, because povray is
already able to parallelize the work. This could be useful in some
situations. For example: your group achieved a very difficult quest, and they
are standing on a dragon's corpse, with blood and tresaures everywhere... why
don't take a 'picture' of that? It could be possible for the quest's leader,
for example, to request such a picture, and the grid could perform an
accurate rendering of the scene, and have it sent to all quest's
partecipants. This is very useless, but again: we have scavenged cpu cycles,
and taking such a picture is not a realtime job. So, the grid will schedule
the stuff, and the picture will arrive as soon as the grid is able to
retrieve allthe subjobs done. And maybe to pay for it if it is in very high
res, for example... :)
Could you think other uses of scavenged cpu cycles?
--
Andrea Negro
address@hidden
ICQ 25458773
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Andrea Negro <=