Massivizing Multi-player Online Games on Clouds

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are an important type of distributed applications and have millions of users. Traditionally, MMOGs are hosted on dedicated clusters, distributed globally. With the advent of cloud computing, MMOGs such as Zynga's are increasingly run on cloud resources, through the use of cloud technology and innovation. Massivizing MMOGs on clouds is the focus of my PhD research. My main contributions are: 1) analyzing and modeling various MMOG workloads, including those of social and traditional real-time games, 2) designing and implementing a cost-efficient and reliable cloud-based MMOG platform, 3) designing and implementing a scalable MMOG system which employs domain-specific scaling techniques to support the realtime strategy games of the future, 4) experimental prototypes and tools to evaluate our proposed research via real-world experimentation and simulation, and applying our proposed research to a popular real-world application. In this article, I introduce my research progress and my future plans. © 2013 IEEE.