In future experiments it would be useful to track the movements of agents be-
tween CPUs, and measure how the agents are balanced between CPUs, another
factor that also would be interesting to add is the load of the cluster operating
system (explaining some of
ijklm
), and a third interesting factor is topology of
the simulated game world and how it is mapped onto the CPUs.
4.1
Scalability of the Zereal Platform
We have used factorial experimental design and identified eight factors that have
effect on the scalability of the simulator. These significant factors are:
1. MarkovKillers
2. PlanAgents
3. Monsters
4. CPUs
5. Radius
6. MarkovKillers*Radius
7. PlanAgents*Radius
8. Monsters*Radius
References
1. Douglas C. Montgomery. Design and Analysis of Experiments, chapter 10, pages
461466. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 4th edition, 1997.
2. Amund Tveit, Øyvind Rein, Jørgen Vinne Iversen, and Mihhail Matskin. Scalable
Agent-based Simulation of Players in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. In Pro-
ceedings of the 8th Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Frontiers in
Artificial Intelligence and Applications. IOS Press, 2003.
98
Performance of the Zereal MMOG Simulator