[vworld-tech] Grid/Cluster technologies and MMO server architectures

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Apr 13, 2004, at 2:53 PM, Jeff Thompson wrote:

> Has anyone looked into using Grid or Clustering technologies for use 
> in MMO servers. I am aware of butterfly grid but didn't find much meat 
> in their public documents. I'm currently looking at Globus and the 
> LAM/MPI implementation.

I've looked at some documents describing the butterfly architecture, 
and at the time (a few years ago) it sounded like complete garbage.  
The technical documentation was riddled with simple errors.  I was 
looking at it from a Python and SQL standpoint, so maybe there is 
something really phenomenal going on in the guts of the engine that I 
couldn't see, but I don't expect much from people who can't tell the 
difference between null-terminated and length-prefixed strings.

As I understand it, "grid" is simply a buzz-word for "thingy that 
commoditizes hardware scalability".  I don't know of an architecture 
that fulfills IBM's grand vision for the word.

> I'm particularly interested in:

> 1) fail over schemes for restarting processes and their data on a new 
> server if the old one is crashed or being serviced (possibly via 
> automatic checkpointing of processes)

Still in the research phase, but:

http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/51/

> 2) schemes for distributing various common jobs such as object 
> messaging based on local, chat systems, etc
> 3) any general thoughts from people who have looked into this
>
> Looking forward to any thoughts.

I'd like to add to the questions: does anyone have any luck applying 
principles learned from academic literature on distributed operating 
systems, or research code platforms, to this problem?
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