Title : On Demand Infrastructure for Online Games

Online gaming is a rapidly growing segment of the video 
games industry and has the potential to be a killer Internet 
application.  Launching a large-scale multiplayer online 
game requires considerable investment in hosting 
infrastructure, however, and the difficulty of predicting 
the success of a new title makes investing in dedicated 
server and network resources very risky.  A shared 
infrastructure based on utility computing models to support 
multiple games offers an attractive option for game 
providers whose core competency is not in managing large 
server deployments.

After giving some brief background on the pertinent 
characteristics of multiplayer online games, we will 
describe a prototype implementation of a shared, on demand 
service platform for online games. The platform builds on 
open standards and off-the-shelf software developed to 
support utility computing offerings for Web-based business 
applications. We will describe our early experience with 
identifying appropriate performance metrics for provisioning 
game servers and show a short demo of the system 
provisioning multiple instances of a popular action game.

This work was done in the Network Software and Services 
group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center.  If time 
permits, we will also give an overview of a few of the other 
ongoing projects in the group.