Architecting for Scale (Beautiful Architecture - Chapter 3)

Are you telling me there are other experiences out there in the world besides Pong and the Atari gaming system? *sigh* The last MMO adventure I participated in was around Feb. 2006 playing Diablo II in a multi-player battle with other co-workers. It is unknown whether or not some of our so called latency problems were bandwidth related or infrastructure problems with Blizzard Entertainment.

Created by Sun Microsystems, Project Darkstar is designed to help developers and operators avoid a range of serious problems associated with online games today such as zone overloading, data corruption, and server under-utilization. No reason to make everyone re-invent the wheel...Take advantage of the programming already completed by someone else.

Project Darkstar presented a fairly novel scaling approach. Any action from a game server can be processed anywhere on the server-side network. Actions working on the same data can be grouped and executed together on the same machine. Grouped actions can also be distributed across multiple servers, and, on each server, individual actions are further distributed across all available threads for parallel execution. Dynamic scaling is easily accommodated where workloads can be balanced across any number of servers, and scaling up or down becomes a simple matter of adding or removing servers.

Since minimizing latency was not the only goal, Project Darkstar maintains game state in a globally shared and persistent Data Store. The Data Store is updated with the results of each action, therefore minimizing data loss in the event of a server failure. All data access requests are wrapped in a transaction to insure that game state remains consistent in the face of conflicting player actions or system failures. The ability to cheat is limited, or at least more difficult, because all shared data are maintained on the server, rather than on players' machines.

With the advancements in architecture and technology, I am somewhat excited to get back into gaming. Unfortunately, that will not be happening until after graduation. Who knows what next gaming adventure will be on the horizon in 2011?