Grid Computing on Massively Multi-User Online Platform

Large-scale online applications such as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) require large amount of computing resources that support many players interacting simultaneously. Cluster computing is the technology mostly used by online game designing firms. Cluster computing is limited by the number and types of computers it can manage, but these computers are usually in the same geographical location. On the other hand, Grid computing offers large-scale high performance distributed computing which connects various types of computing resources on the Internet. In this paper, we design a Grid computing platform called the Massively Multi-user Online Platform (MMOP). The objectives of this proposed design are to offer scalability, flexibility, and simplicity to the development processes of distributed applications. MMOP allows executions of applications based on specified policy rules with dynamic addition of computing resources at run-time. Each application is managed separately, and multiple large-scale applications can share a single computing architecture. An online game has been built to test the functional behavior of the MMOP. From the simulation results, the MMOP has demonstrated as a high performance and scalable computing architecture.