DSG for MOSES Mic Bowman is a principal engineer in Intel Labs and leads the Virtual World Infrastructure research project. His team develops technologies that enable “order of magnitude” scalability improvements in virtual environments opening the door to new levels of immersiveness and interaction among players. Douglas Maxwell is Science and Technology Manager for the U.S. Army Research Lab, Simulation and Training Technology Center in Orlando, Florida.

1. Intel Technologies for Scalable
Virtual Environments
Mic Bowman
Robert Adams, Dan Lake, Kitty Liu
Intel Labs

2. 2
Grand Challenge: Scalability
Scene Complexity, Concurrent Users & Interactions
50 Avatars
500 Avatars
50,000 Avatars

3. 3
Improved Scalability  New Usages
Serious Games
Historical Reconstruction
Disaster Planning

4. 4
Current Server Architecture
All functions in one package
• Sharding/partitioning scale out by limiting interactions
• Cannot scale up interactions or immersiveness

5. 5
Scalability Constraints
Simulation
Communication
Rendering
Constrained by
limited computation
Constrained by
network limitations
Constrained by
graphics pipeline
Disaggregate the
computation and
distribute dynamically
Leverage redundancy
in the communication
using “multicast”
Manage level of detail and
leverage redundancy in
viewpoints

6. 6
Our Approach: Distributed Scene Graph
Scene and actors distributed
• Scene
– Spatially partitioned based on load
– Exposes synchronization interface
• Actors
– Operate independently and
asynchronously
– Use HW best suited for workload
– Plug in new simulators for new
behaviors
• Implementation:
– BSD-licensed integration with the OpenSimulator 3D application server
Interactions & immersiveness scale up with HW

7. 7
Scene Synchronization
Example Deployment
ORLANDO
Physics
Scripts
Persistence
CHICAGO
Client Mgmt
SAN JOSE
Client Mgmt
BOSTON
Client Mgmt
OREGON
Client Mgmt
Simulation components
in the same data center
Synchronization over
managed networks is
best
Move client connections to the edge of
the network, shorten UDP links

8. 8
Results
• Demonstrated 10X increase in interacting clients
– Distributed physics, script, persistence servers
– Client managers across multiple geographies
– 25 servers to support 1000 interacting clients

9. 9
Observations
• Still more work on DSG technologies
– Optimize scene synchronization services (in progress)
– Optimize texture distribution (level of detail, pre-fetch, etc)
– …
• However…
–Simulation is no longer the bottleneck

10. 10