Streaming video game purveyor Colin Williamson presented Shinra Technologies' vision for cloud gaming and development at the GigHacks hackathon, held in KC at the Google Fiber Space and organized by KC Digital Drive.

1. Shinra Technologies
Gighacks 2015
COLIN WILLIAMSON
DIRECTOR OF
PARTNERSHIPS
© 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.

2. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Who is this guy?
Name: Colin Williamson
Blood Type: AB
Likes: Cats
Dislikes: Octopus
Favorite Game:
Daytona USA
Fighting Style:
Sneaky

3. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Who arethese guys?
 A new cloud gaming platform
 …and not a publisher
 Subsidiary of Square Enix in Tokyo
 Headquarters in New York City
 Technology team in Montreal
Shinra Offices (Circa 20XX)
Shinra Offices (Circa 2015)

4. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
High-workloadcloud
Streaming Video
Controller Input
Cloud
Internet
TOMB RAIDER ©2013 SQUARE ENIX LTD. Published by Square Enix Co., Ltd.
CRYSTAL DYNAMICS, the CRYSTAL DYNAMICS logo, EIDOS, the EIDOS logo, LARA CROFT and TOMB RAIDER are registered trademarks or
trademarks of Square Enix Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of
Square Enix Holdings Co, Ltd. Data Center image from https://www.cwcs.co.uk/

5. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
…
…AND NOT A SERVICE WHERE THE DEVELOPER
PAYS FOR STREAMING

6. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
WhyStreaming is Super Great
 Thin client, deployable to any streaming device
 Hey – we don’t have to sell hardware!
 We’ll put it on any box with a controller
 No mobile – for now; mapping 15 buttons to a touchscreen is no fun
 No major technical dependencies on client CPU/GPU/OS
 No load times if set up correctly
 No downloading & patching
 No client-side cheating / hacking (hi, eSports!)
 Piracy is very, very hard

7. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
The Streaming Ecosystem
 Value has shifted from client to cloud for music, books, movies, TV
 But games? We need to push harder
 The cloud = Big ol’ storage locker
 Server-side offload is on the rise
 Remote rendering is inevitable
 The good news: The infrastructure has caught up

8. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
…Now,About the Latency Thing…

9. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
The QualityBar
 No substandard experiences!
 Platform will initially be available on fiber services
 We are partnering with fiber infrastructure
providers
 Service first available in Japan, then expansion to
USA and Europe
 Technical Beta in Japan with NTT East (from Feb. 2015)
 Technical Beta in Kansas City for Google Fiber
subscribers this summer!
 Initial US service in high-spend metropolitan
areas, then moving inward (Tesla strategy)

10. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
What WeGotta Do
Define what shared compute can
do for games
Provide the toolkits to make never-
before-seen experiences
Become the de facto platform for
cloud-exclusive content
Make smart use of expensive server
hardware
Reduce inefficiencies of traditional
client-based model
Ensure that the system is scalable
Make Amazing Stuff AND make it Economical

11. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
The man in charge
 Tetsuji Iwasaki
 System architect
 25-year industry veteran
 Hobby: Beer
 Claims to fame:
 Final Fantasy Tactics
 Final Fantasy XI
 Crysis

12. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
What is asupercomputer, anyway?
Reprinted from http://jp.fujitsu.com/about/tech/k/ スーパーコンピュータ「京」as of 2014/9/17

13. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Top10Supercomputers(top500.org)
1 Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2)
TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel
Xeon Phi 31S1P
NUDT China
2 Titan
Cray XK7 , Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA
K20x
Cray Inc. United States
3 Sequoia BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom IBM United States
4 K-Computer SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect Fujitsu Japan
5 Mira BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom IBM United States
6 Piz Daint Cray XC30, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA K20x Cray Inc. Switzerland
7 Stampede
PowerEdge C8220, Xeon E5-2680 8C 2.700GHz, Infiniband FDR, Intel Xeon
Phi SE10P
Dell United States
8 JUQUEEN BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect IBM Germany
9 Vulcan BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect IBM United States
10 Cray Cray XC30, Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 12C 2.7GHz, Aries interconnect Cray Inc. United States
Reprinted from http://www.top500.org

14. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
SupercomputerspoweredbyIntelXeon
1 Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2)
TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel
Xeon Phi 31S1P
NUDT China
2 Titan
Cray XK7 , Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA
K20x
Cray Inc. United States
3 Sequoia BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom IBM United States
4 K-Computer SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect Fujitsu Japan
5 Mira BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom IBM United States
6 Piz Daint Cray XC30, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA K20x Cray Inc. Switzerland
7 Stampede
PowerEdge C8220, Xeon E5-2680 8C 2.700GHz, Infiniband FDR, Intel Xeon
Phi SE10P
Dell United States
8 JUQUEEN BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect IBM Germany
9 Vulcan BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect IBM United States
10 Cray Cray XC30, Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 12C 2.7GHz, Aries interconnect Cray Inc. United States
Reprinted from http://www.top500.org

15. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
SupercomputerspoweredbyXeonPhi/nVidiaTesla
1 Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2)
TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel
Xeon Phi 31S1P
NUDT China
2 Titan
Cray XK7 , Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA
K20x
Cray Inc. United States
3 Sequoia BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom IBM United States
4 K-Computer SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect Fujitsu Japan
5 Mira BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom IBM United States
6 Piz Daint Cray XC30, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA K20x Cray Inc. Switzerland
7 Stampede
PowerEdge C8220, Xeon E5-2680 8C 2.700GHz, Infiniband FDR, Intel Xeon
Phi SE10P
Dell United States
8 JUQUEEN BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect IBM Germany
9 Vulcan BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect IBM United States
10 Cray Cray XC30, Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 12C 2.7GHz, Aries interconnect Cray Inc. United States
Reprinted from http://www.top500.org

16. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
The Trend
 General-purpose processors
 85.4% of the top500 list is on Intel x86
 No exact numbers, but most are likely Xeon
 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is ranked as 76th
 Amazon EC2 C3 Instance cluster: Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 10C
2.800GHz, 10G Ethernet

17. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
DEGIMA:Supercomputing onaBudget
＊Tsuyoshi Hamada, Tetsu Narumi, Rio Yokota, Kenji Yasuoka and Keigo Nitadori. 42 TFlops Hierarchical N-body Simulations on
GPUs with Applications in both Astrophysics and Turbulence. SC '09 Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Computing
Networking, Storage and Analysis Article No. 62
 Built by Nagasaki Advanced Computing
Center
 Hardware specs:
 Started with 32 GPUs, but then…
 256x 8880GTS
 256x 9800GTX
 288x GTX295
 +768 GPUS, sustained performance:
158 Tflops!
 $7.20 / Gflops
 2009 Gordon Bell prize for price/performance!

18. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
DEGIMA:Low-costand Green
 Cost: $400,000
 Was the greenest accelerator-based
supercomputer in the world
 Upgraded later to Infiniband
for 158  190 TFlops!
 At such a low cost,
why not use it for games?
Reprinted from http://www.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~yoshiki/HEART/HEART2012/keynote.html
Professor Tsuyoshi
Hamada

19. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
…What next?
 So we’ve put general-purpose CPUs and GPUs in
the cloud for compute and render farms
 …But how do we put them to smart and
economical use?

20. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Noempty glasses!
5x 80% glasses One 0% glass

21. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
TraditionalStreaming Architecture
CPU GPU
Logical unit of game system
Physical unit
• Efficient use of virtual
machines
• 1 user = 1 logical unit
• Inefficient use of CPU/GPU
• High cost per user
CPU
GPU
GPU
CPU
GPU
CPU
User
User
User

22. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
CPU&GPUPerformanceMatching
CPU
GPU
CPU
GPU

23. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Our solution:
Separate CPU from rendering

24. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Remote Rendering Architecture
Logical unit of game system
Physical unit
• Physically separate CPU &
GPU Servers
• Many users per logical unit
• Flexible architecture allows
efficient CPU/GPU usage
User User User User User User User User
User User User User User User User User
User User User User User User User User
User User User User User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User User User User User
User User User User User User User User
User User User User User User User User
User User User User User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
User User User User
CPU
CPU
CPU GPU
CPU
CPU CPU
CPU CPU
CPU CPU
CPU CPU
GPU
GPU
GPU
GPU
GPU
GPU
GPU

25. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Our Starting Goal
Run any Windows-based
DX11 / DX9 game
remotely…
Without having to rebuild
the game!

26. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Game.exe Game.exe Renderer.exeGame.exe
input
video
stream
rendering
commands
Remote Rendering 101
TOMB RAIDER ©2013 SQUARE ENIX LTD. Published by Square Enix Co., Ltd.
CRYSTAL DYNAMICS, the CRYSTAL DYNAMICS logo, EIDOS, the EIDOS logo, LARA CROFT and TOMB RAIDER are registered trademarks or
trademarks of Square Enix Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of
Square Enix Holdings Co, Ltd.

27. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
System Overview

28. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
FakeDLLS=Performanceboost
nvwgf2umx.dlld3d11.dll + ≈ 9ms/frame
Fake
d3d11.dll
ws2_32.dll+ ≈ 4.4ms/frame
• Remote rendering with resource sharing saves 4.6ms per frame in Deus Ex:
Human Revolution
• We cache the results of operations already performed in other instances
• Saved time = More instances of the game on the server
DEUS EX ©2011 SQUARE ENIX LTD. Published by Square Enix Co., Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks
or trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co, Ltd. DEUS EX, the DEUS EX logo, EIDOS, the EIDOS logo, EIDOS MONTREAL and the EIDOS
MONTREAL logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Square Enix Ltd.
Shared!
Standalone
Deus Ex: HR

29. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Sharing Texture Cache
• Problem: GPU memory is limited (and expensive)
 We need more memory than normal games for:
• Encoding buffers
• Server window
• Statistics
• Once we run out, the GPU starts swapping!
• We want to run many instances of a game on the same server.
• Solution: Find what can be shared across the multiple instances
of a running game and reuse.

30. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Resource Sharing
DEUS EX ©2011 SQUARE ENIX LTD. Published by Square Enix Co., Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks
or trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co, Ltd. DEUS EX, the DEUS EX logo, EIDOS, the EIDOS logo, EIDOS MONTREAL and the EIDOS
MONTREAL logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Square Enix Ltd.

31. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Densitydemo
4x Quadro K5000
1 screen = 1 GPU
57 game instances
on one server PC!
Youtube link here

32. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Back CatalogPorting
 We are launching with back catalog content
 Porting can take several days (with engines we’ve worked before) or
1-2 weeks (new engines)
 Porting takes place on our side
 Be ready; we may have to ask some code-related questions
 Source access makes it much easier for all involved

33. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
The result is:
 Current Windows games run just fine on Shinra Technology…
… Or we can make things much more interesting

34. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
The Breakin Design

35. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Break inDesign
GTA5 Multi WoW EVE

36. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
The Game-Changer: 1:NArchitecture
Game
Viewer
Viewer
Viewer
Viewer
Viewer
Viewer
Internet
Data Center

37. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Simplystated…
 Each player is a viewport to a giant, high-
fidelity game world instance that’s
running on a supercomputer

38. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Howit works:
 Uses a single instance of game engine
 All players interact within the same
world
 Physics & AI shared across all users
 Think local split-screen game...on a
much larger scale
 Calculations are done ONCE.
 The requirement to write intensive
synchronized network code no longer
exists
Tokyo Trainwreck assets ©2015 C. Williamson/S. Kojima/R. Gray

39. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
So that means…
 There’s no need to synchronize game & world state across
clients!
 Cloud-based simulation doesn’t have to be window dressing...
 It can directly affect gameplay!

40. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Standard Development: One Pie

41. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Shinra Development: MorePie

42. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Distributed Game Architecture
 Dedicated hardware
for functional units
 Calculations shared
amongst users
Multithreaded code
works extremely well
with this model!

43. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Thinking Big: R&DDemo
 Youtube link here

44. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Thinking Small: The Indie Paradox
 What can I do as a single programmer?
 What if I don’t have a fiber connection?
 What if I don’t have a supercomputer to develop on?
 What if I live on an island in the middle of nowhere?
Reprinted from https://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/4087637106/

45. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Meetthe Shinra Community CDK
 Simple toolkit for making 2D cloud games
 Works with any repository
 Create & test content locally!
 Push to our servers for test
 Support network via GitHub Discussions & Facebook Groups
 Japanese version on 5/15, English version coming shortly
afterwards
 More details at tech.shinra.com

46. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
CCDKExample: SpaceSweeper
スペース・スウィーパー
©2014 Shinra Technologies, Inc.

47. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Development Types
 To reiterate, we are planning three different
architectures:
 1:1 – Simple self-deployment kit (as-is DirectX)
N:N – Shinra Community SDK (Space Sweeper)
1:N – (R&D Demo)

48. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Timeline
 We are talking to developers right now!
 3-month closed technical beta in Japan starting February 2015
with back catalog content, Agni’s Philosophy tech demo and
Space Sweeper
 North American technical beta this summer
 Initial platform is PC, with set-top box support planned

49. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Wrappingthings up:
 We are a platform that is deploying on fiber to start
 We can run Windows/DirectX titles in the cloud economically
 We are working on architectures for cloud-exclusive titles can make for radically
different multiplayer experiences
 What would you make with unlimited CPU / GPU?

50. © 2015 Shinra Technologies, Inc.
Q&A