@inproceedings {srmpds-lears,
	title = {LEARS: a Lockless, Relaxed-Atomicity State Model for Parallel Execution of a Game Server Partition},
	journal = {The 41st International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops},
	year = {2012},
	note = {Published as part of the SRMPDS workshop proceedings},
	publisher = {IACC},
	type = {Workshop},
	abstract = {Supporting thousands of interacting players in a virtual world poses huge challenges with respect to processing. Existing work that addresses the challenge utilizes a variety of spatial partitioning algorithms to distribute the load. If, however, a large number of players needs to interact tightly across an area of the game world, spatial partitioning cannot subdivide this area without incurring massive communication costs, latency or inconsistency. It is a major challenge of game engines to scale such areas to the largest number of players possible; in a deviation from earlier thinking, parallelism on multi-core architectures is applied to increase scalability. In this paper, we evaluate the design and implementation of our game server architecture, called LEARS, which allows for lock-free parallel processing of a single spatial partition by considering every game cycle an atomic tick. Our prototype is evaluated using traces from live game sessions where we measure the server response time for all objects that need timely updates. We also measure how the response time for the multi-threaded implementation varies with the number of threads used. Our results show that the challenge of scaling up a game-server can be an embarrassingly parallel problem.},
	isbn = {978-0-7695-4795-4},
	doi = {10.1109/ICPPW.2012.55},
	author = {Raaen, Kjetil and Espeland, H{\r a}vard and H{\r a}kon Kvale {Stensland} and Petlund, Andreas and Halvorsen, P{\r a}l and Griwodz, Carsten},
	editor = {Balaji, Pavan and Lin, Heshan}
}
@inproceedings {srmpds12-lls,
	title = {Low-Level Scheduling Implications for Data-Intensive Cyclic Workloads on Modern Microarchitectures},
	journal = {The 41st International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops},
	year = {2012},
	publisher = {IACC},
	type = {Workshop},
	abstract = {Processing data intensive multimedia workloads is challenging, and scheduling and resource management are vitally important for the best possible utilization of machine resources. In earlier work, we have used work-stealing, which is frequently used today, and proposed improvements. We found already then that no singular work-stealing variant is ideally suited for all workloads. Therefore, we investigate in more detail in this paper how workloads consisting of various multimedia filter sequences should be scheduled on a variety of modern processor architectures to maximize performance. Our results show that a low-level scheduler additionally cannot achieve optimal performance without taking the specific micro-architecture, the placement of dependent tasks and cache sizes into account. These details are not generally available for application developers and they differ between deployments. Our proposal is therefore to use performance monitoring and dynamic adaption for the cyclic workloads of our target multimedia scenario, where operations are repeated cyclically on a stream of data.},
	isbn = {978-0-7695-4795-4},
	doi = {10.1109/ICPPW.2012.49},
	author = {Espeland, H{\r a}vard and Preben N. {Olsen} and Halvorsen, P{\r a}l and Griwodz, Carsten},
	editor = {Balaji, Pavan and Lin, Heshan}
}
