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

[Matthew Dowd]

I'm still playing catch up so this may have already been mentioned, but I think it would also be worth considering how the Region simulator (or rather components) maps to actual servers, and (as I think has been suggested) start considering computer grid computing based architectures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing) to handle the region scalability problem (e.g. regions with >100 users).
 
So for instance, initially a region sim with only a few users may be running on a compute node (which might be a cluster) alongside other regions.
 
As the region gets busier it might move itself to a more powerful node or a node running fewer regions (or perhaps a dedicated node).
 
At some point it might start splitting tasks - so the physic engine gets moved to one node, and the script engine to another.
 
As the load really increases it may even split sub tasks - e.g. splitting the script engine between two nodes (of course, this may introduce communication latencies).
 
I've worked with grid computing enough to know that the above is not trivial, and is much easier to express than actually do, but I think it worth considering this in the architecture discussions - at the very least the architecture should support the above even if not initially implement it.
 
Matthew


From: markl at lindenlab.comSubject: Re: [sldev] [ARCH] Raw notes from the Second Life Grid Architecture Working Group.Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:44:11 -0700To: sldev at lists.secondlife.com; tao.takashi at googlemail.com

On Sep 14, 2007, at 1:05 PM, Liana Holmberg wrote:
Zero's slides are available at Hippotropolis 212, 13,24. 
And now up on the wiki:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/ArchWG_Mtg_1_Slides

- Zero


Mark Lentczner
Director, Studio Icehouse
Linden Lab

markl at lindenlab.com

Zero Linden
zero.linden at secondlife.com

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