[sldev] [ARCH] Raw notes from the Second Life Grid Architecture Working Group.

[Liana Holmberg]

Zero's slides are available at Hippotropolis 212, 13,24.

Tao Takashi wrote:
> Hi!
>
> As I was part of the meeting yesterday I though I might shade some 
> light in what actually was discussed there in form of a little 
> introduction. I already posted some initial thoughts on my blog:
> http://taotakashi.wordpress.com/2007/09/14/linden-lab-reveals-the-future-of-second-life/
>
> So basically it is all about the future of the SL grid. If you imagine 
> a not so distant future in which virtual worlds are a part of 
> everybody's life as it is now numbers of regions, numbers of users and 
> concurrency will raise in the millions and billions. It should be 
> clear that the current setup of the grid will not be able to cope with 
> that (think central servers).
>
> The other issue is the requirements many companies and other 
> institutions have regarding the grid. For instance many want to host 
> their own content instead of letting Linden Lab to do that. This might 
> be ok with marketing activities but might not be the case with 
> confidential content for online collaboration. And as you also know 
> there was a some talk recently about allowing sims hosted by 3rd 
> parties connect to the Second Life grid. You on this list here are 
> very aware of the issues involved with that.
>
> To solve all these problems a new grid architecture needs to be made. 
> And this is what Zero Linden et. al. was presenting yesterday. I 
> believe he will put up the slides on the wiki soon as they are sort of 
> important to understand all this. More important is though that Linden 
> Lab is not thinking about doing all this architectural work etc. alone 
> in private but in fact it is a very open project and everybody is 
> invited to participate. The first meeting needed to be a small group 
> of people in order to get it started but it's not a fixed group and 
> mostly participation drives the decision who might be part of the next 
> meeting. Also no decisions have been made and nothing is set in stone 
> yet (it also takes some time to understand all that and think about 
> issues/problems anyway).
>
> Communication about this project will be done on the wiki, on Jira and 
> on this list. So the usual communcation mechanisms will be used. There 
> have been workitems defined during the first meeting like collecting 
> use cases, thinking about possible altermative architectures and so on 
> and all these need your input. You can find them in the chatlog 
> attached in the initial mail if you search for "WORKITEM".
>
>
> **The architecture**
>
> I am not sure I got everything completely right but let me shortly 
> describe the basic principles as I understood it.
>
> Basically we have right now the region as the main entry point for 
> viewers to connect. They also act as proxies to the central servers 
> such as user server, asset server and so on. With the projected 
> numbers from above those central servers will not very likely be 
> capable of handling this load.
>
> So the main approach is to split between agents and regions and Zero 
> presented us with the Agent domain and Region doman. The Agent Domain 
> knows everything about agents and the Region Domain knows everything 
> about Regions.
>
> The agent domain consist of 3 parts: The agent services, the agent 
> hosts and the agent store.
> The agent service contains stateless information about an agent (e.g. 
> profile information), the agent host stores session information about 
> a logged in avatar (where is the agent, which friends are online, 
> status of the agent (busy?) ...) and the agent store stores the actual 
> data about an agent, including inventory.
>
> All these might be separate boxes or a cluster of boxes, it doesn't 
> matter to the architecture.
>
> The region domain consists of similar parts: Region services know 
> stateless information about a region such as the name, Region hosts 
> are basically what we call today simulators (OpenSim could be an 
> implementation of such a region host) and Region Stores store 
> information about a region such as the objects on the region, land 
> information etc.
>
> Then there are some global services such as identity (important is to 
> have only one identity and not one for every grid), location (actually 
> better named topology as it defines which region is next to which), 
> currency (L$ or something else) and search.
>
> Now there can be multiple agent domains and region domains and it's a 
> question of trust which region domains lets agents from a specific 
> agent domain in. One region and agent domain would be the one of 
> Linden Lab and it might allow further agent domains (such as one of 
> company x) to login to their region domain. If might even allow every 
> agent domain but maybe with restricted access (no rezzing, ...)
>
> But I might get a bit too much into detail here. Just imagine that all 
> this should be as flexible as possible. There are many hard problems 
> such as topology and identity and probably many we don't see right 
> now. And that's why discussion and use case scenarios are very 
> important to have.
>
> I am not sure the chatlog makes more sense now but I hope it does. :-)
>
> And I might also describe this further on the wiki as soon as the 
> slides are there and nobody else has done it already.
>
> I definitely hope that a lot of people will participate in this! It 
> truly rocks :-)
>
> (and if I made any mistakes please correct me!)
>
> -- Tao
>
>
> -- 
> taotakashi at gmail.com <mailto:taotakashi at gmail.com>
> http://taotakashi.wordpress.com <http://taotakashi.wordpress.com>
> http://worldofsl.com
>
> RL: Christian Scholz, cs at comlounge.net <mailto:cs at comlounge.net>
> http://mrtopf.de
>
> http://comlounge.net
> http://comlounge.tv
> http://mrtopf.tv
> http://dev.comlounge.net
> IRC: MrTopf/Tao_T
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