Towards an Efficient Containerized Cloud Gaming Platform
Résumé
Virtual machines (VMs) raise several challenges for efficiently accommodating Cloud-gaming needs. The first challenge concerns VM boot time. Booting a VM can take several milliseconds to several seconds based on the operating system (OS) and the modules that must be loaded. Consequently, waiting for a VM to boot upon a user's game-start request impacts the game startup latency and, thus, user experience. To mitigate this startup issue, Cloud-gaming providers maintain a pool of preinitialized VMs, which leads to resource waste when the pool is not fully used. The second challenge concerns the flexibility of VMs regarding their memory size due to the lack of memory hotplug and unplug features. VMs cannot adapt their memory size to accommodate the heterogeneous memory requirements of existing video games. Concretely, pre-initialized VMs for a specific game cannot always be reused to host another game with different memory requirements. This means pre-initialized VMs must be configured with large memory sizes to host several games, leading to memory waste.
In this paper, we bootstrap a discussion to steer away from a VM-centric Cloud-gaming infrastructure in favor of more resource-efficient infrastructures. To this end, we take a two-fold approach. First, we propose using containers as an efficient alternative to Windows VMs for video games. Our experiments show that the lightweight nature of containers achieves up to 10.6% energy-usage reduction without impacting the gaming experience. Second, we propose a novel GPU-sharing idea tailored for game containers. We discuss state-of-the-art GPU-sharing approaches, show their practical limitations for Cloud-gaming platforms, and present our envisioned GPU-sharing approach.
Domaines
| Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
|---|---|
| Licence |