[MUD-Dev] Re: TECH: Distributed Muds

[Bruce]

J C Lawrence wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Apr 2001 18:52:11 -0400 
> Derek Snider <derek at idirect.com> wrote:
 
>> I'm not too clear on that UO's model is/was, only what a good
>> working model would be.  The above model allows you to take
>> advantage of a large TCP Window between the network servers and the
>> zone servers.
 
> Or, given that you control the wire and everything else between the
> two, to do your own protocol on top of IP (a fairly common approach).

Or move over to custom interconnect hardware and move to some sort of
message passing system, like MPI.  But that assumes an amount of
traffic within a cluster that I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with.
I'd be much happier not having that much data being shared. :)

But, if working with IP, one nice technique that isn't terribly well
exploited in the mud community today is the use of multicast groups
within a cluster.  (Although, that might have something to do with the
lack of any cluster-based mud codebases. :)

  http://perso.enst.fr/~parmenti/these/papers/Conceptual/GroupMembership.html 

is one paper that discusses some of that.  There's a lot of research
into that matter which can be readily found.  (And that paper
discusses a model fairly similar to a lot of what I'd been thinking
about doing.)

And there are other interesting techniques that don't require custom
hardware for lessening the network latency within large clusters,
without putting out the money for very large and expensive switches,
like the work done at the University of Kentucky on 'Flat Neighborhood
Networks as described at:

  http://aggregate.org/FNN/

  - Bruce

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