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Transactional memory support for scalable and transparent parallelization of multiplayer games

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Cristiana AmzaAuthors Info & Claims

EuroSys '10: Proceedings of the 5th European conference on Computer systems

Pages 41 - 54

https://doi.org/10.1145/1755913.1755919

Published: 13 April 2010 Publication History

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Abstract

In this paper, we study parallelization of multiplayer games using software Transactional Memory (STM) support. We show that the STM provides not only ease of programming, but also better performance than that achievable with state-of-the-art lock-based programming, for this realistic high impact application.

For this purpose, we use a game benchmark, SynQuake, that extracts the main data structures and the essential features of the popular game Quake. SynQuake can be driven with a synthetic workload generator that flexibly emulates client game actions and various hot-spot scenarios in the game world. We implement, evaluate and compare the STM version of SynQuake with a state-of-the-art lock-based parallelization of Quake, which we ported to SynQuake. While in STM-SynQuake support for maintaining the consistency of each complex game action is automatic, conservative locking of surrounding objects within a bounding box, for the duration of the game action is inherently needed in lock-based SynQuake. This leads to higher scalability of STM-SynQuake versus lock-based SynQuake, due to a higher degree of false sharing in the latter. Task assignment to threads has a second-order effect on the scalability of STM-SynQuake, due to its impact on the application's true sharing patterns. We show that a dynamic locality-aware task assignment to threads provides the best trade-off between load balancing and conflict reduction.

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Abdi JPosluns GZhang GWang BJeffrey MAgrawal KPetrank E(2024)When Is Parallelism Fearless and Zero-Cost with Rust?Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures10.1145/3626183.3659966(27-40)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
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Park SAhmad ALee BLigatti JOu XKatz JVigna G(2020)BlackMirror: Preventing Wallhacks in 3D Online FPS GamesProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3372297.3417890(987-1000)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2020
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Bhattacharyya ADai Wang MBurcea MDing YDeng AVarikooty SHossain SAmza C(2017)POSTERACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3155284.301902752:8(433-434)Online publication date: 26-Jan-2017
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Index Terms

Transactional memory support for scalable and transparent parallelization of multiplayer games
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Parallel computing methodologies
    1. Parallel programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Parallel programming languages

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Reviews

Reviewer: Jingping Long

One of the most difficult parts of multi-threaded programming is handling conflicting requests from different sources (such as different players in a multi-player game) to maintain data consistency, while not penalizing performance harshly. The most popular way to solve this type of conflict in multi-threaded programming is based on locks-a thread must first obtain an atomic object (the lock) before it can operate on potentially shared data items. The main drawbacks of this approach include programming complexity (the programmer has to know when to lock) and performance issues (the programmer has to assume the worst-case scenario, so locks are often used excessively). Lupei et al. replace the lock-based method with software transactional memory (STM) support in a popular multi-player game, to study the benefits of STM. The basic idea of STM is to first record the intentions of all the threads and then make permanent changes after such intentions are verified as legitimate (no consistency is violated, as we do transactions in our banks). In addition to using STM, the authors also apply dynamic load balancing (in assigning tasks to threads) with data locality awareness. The study finds that STM performs better than the lock-based implementation when the game is run on four and eight threads. The work is valuable in the sense that it provides realistic data to support what has been advocated: STM not only eases the parallelization effort, but also implies better performance. The paper would have been even more valuable if it had studied runs with more threads (16, 32, and so on), as multicore chips have gained popularity. Also, it would have been nice if the paper had elaborated on why the lock-based implementation in the game is state of the art. This would make the paper's claim of better performance more convincing. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Published In

EuroSys '10: Proceedings of the 5th European conference on Computer systems

April 2010

388 pages

ISBN:9781605585772

DOI:10.1145/1755913

General Chair:
Christine Morin
INRIA Rennes, France
,
Program Chair:
Gilles Muller
INRIA/LIP6, France

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 13 April 2010

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EuroSys '10

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SIGOPS

EuroSys '10: Fifth EuroSys Conference 2010

April 13 - 16, 2010

Paris, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 241 of 1,308 submissions, 18%

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Cited By

View all

Abdi JPosluns GZhang GWang BJeffrey MAgrawal KPetrank E(2024)When Is Parallelism Fearless and Zero-Cost with Rust?Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures10.1145/3626183.3659966(27-40)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626183.3659966
Park SAhmad ALee BLigatti JOu XKatz JVigna G(2020)BlackMirror: Preventing Wallhacks in 3D Online FPS GamesProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3372297.3417890(987-1000)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372297.3417890
Bhattacharyya ADai Wang MBurcea MDing YDeng AVarikooty SHossain SAmza C(2017)POSTERACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3155284.301902752:8(433-434)Online publication date: 26-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3155284.3019027
Diegues NRomano PGarbatov S(2017)SeerACM Transactions on Computer Systems10.1145/313203635:3(1-41)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3132036
Bhattacharyya ADai Wang MBurcea MDing YDeng AVarikooty SHossain SAmza CSarkar VRauchwerger L(2017)POSTERProceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/3018743.3019027(433-434)Online publication date: 26-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3018743.3019027
Didona DDiegues NKermarrec AGuerraoui RNeves RRomano P(2016)ProteusTMACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News10.1145/2980024.287238544:2(757-771)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2980024.2872385
Didona DDiegues NKermarrec AGuerraoui RNeves RRomano P(2016)ProteusTMACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/2954680.287238550:2(757-771)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
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Didona DDiegues NKermarrec AGuerraoui RNeves RRomano P(2016)ProteusTMACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2954679.287238551:4(757-771)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2954679.2872385
Didona DDiegues NKermarrec AGuerraoui RNeves RRomano PConte TZhou Y(2016)ProteusTMProceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/2872362.2872385(757-771)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2872362.2872385
Bihari BYang UWong Mde Supinski B(2016)Transactional Memory for Algebraic Multigrid SmoothersOpenMP: Memory, Devices, and Tasks10.1007/978-3-319-45550-1_23(320-335)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2016
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Towards scalable and transparent parallelization of multiplayer games using transactional memory support

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