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

[dirk husemann]

Matthew Dowd wrote:
>
> 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.

good points, really. my thinking is that the current segmentation should
only be a model to use when defining the *network protocols* --- and we
should try and come up with other models to work against as well! if we
manage to describe the grid in terms of protocols without imposing a
fixed way of segmenting it into services (or only a small amount of it),
we should then be able to implement all kinds of grid service provider
systems.

what are your thoughts?

    cheers,
    dirk

-- 
dr dirk husemann, pervasive computing, ibm zurich research lab
--- hud at zurich.ibm.com --- +41 44 724 8573 --- SL: dr scofield

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