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Towards scalable and transparent parallelization of multiplayer games using transactional memory support

Published:09 January 2010Publication History
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Abstract

This work addresses the problem of parallelizing multiplayer games using software Transactional Memory (STM) support. Using a realistic high impact application, we show that STM provides not only ease of programming, but also better performance than that achievable with state-of-the-art lock-based programming.

Towards this goal, we use SynQuake, a game benchmark which extracts the main data structures and the essential features of the popular multiplayer game Quake, but can be driven with a synthetic workload generator that flexibly emulates client game actions and various hot-spot scenarios in the game world.

We implement, evaluate and compare the STM version of SynQuake with a state-of-the-art lock-based parallelization of Quake, which we ported to SynQuake. While in STM-SynQuake support for maintaining the consistency of each potentially complex game action is automatic, conservative locking of surrounding objects within a bounding box for the duration of the game action is inherently needed in lock-based SynQuake. This leads to a higher scalability factor of STM-SynQuake versus lock-based SynQuake, due to a higher degree of false sharing in the latter.

References

  1. A. Abdelkhalek and A. Bilas. Parallelization and performance of interactive multiplayer game servers. IPDPS 2004, page 72a.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  2. D. Lupei, A. Czajkowski, C. Segulja, M. Stumm, and C. Amza. Automatic adaptation of transactional memory state management to application conflict patterns. In Interact 2009, pages 47--56.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

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  1. Towards scalable and transparent parallelization of multiplayer games using transactional memory support

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