[Ainulindale-devel] Scavenged resources: CPU

[Andrea Negro]

Just to fix and hear ideas about that.
If a user allows it, a computer connecting to the grid is actually 'donating' 
resources to the grid itself: this is why such clients (which may or may not 
be also 'playing clients) are called 'donor'.
Resources means everything you can think about: mainly, cpu cycles and disk 
space, but also bandwidth or special hardware.
I was thinking about how to manage this resources. Disk space, for instance, 
could be used for data replication, backup or distributed storage, but this 
part is not completely clear to me right now.
I was thinking about the cpu resource instead. This is simpler to think about: 
think about the Seti at Home, its concept is quite understandable.
I see three uses of cpu resources donated to Ainulindale by now:

1) to run NPC remotely, thus not having to use gaming site resources to handle 
complex AI of particular NPC. This is quite simple to think about, as a NPC 
is actually the same as a PC, so why do not use the same physical location af 
a regular user? The only raised concern is about the security, or techniques 
to avoid hacking code which is running on your machine to have advantages in 
the game. Ideas about that?

2) to perform world's simulations. Derfel and me are thinking about use of 
particular algorithms which should perform an autonomic simulation of the 
world. Fro example, algorithms could provide means to create a wheather in a 
more realistic way than just having random weather, or to manage the number 
of elements of a specie, eg rabbits or cows. This way the world should run 
and change by itself. For example, and area builder could simply put seeds of 
trees, and the world takes care on run to have the trees to grow. Of course, 
this is something that in a regular mud or mmorpg is useless, because it 
requires a lot of computational power to develop, and an approximation is 
always appropriate. But I think this is possible in Ainulindale, because all 
we have to do is to setup the base rules, and to define that the level of 
simulation accuracy should depend on the quantity of scavenged cpu available. 
The more computers donate cpu cycles to the world, the more accurate the 
simpulation become. I can see a key element here, we could think about it as 
a sort of 'world scheduler', or 'autonomic events scheduler', or 'nature 
scheduler', or 'simulation scheduler'... suggestions? :)

3) to perform accurte renderings via povray. To perform complex scene 
rendering in povray over a grid could be rahter simple, because povray is 
already able to parallelize the work. This could be useful in some 
situations. For example: your group achieved a very difficult quest, and they 
are standing on a dragon's corpse, with blood and tresaures everywhere... why 
don't take a 'picture' of that? It could be possible for the quest's leader, 
for example, to request such a picture, and the grid could perform an 
accurate rendering of the scene, and have it sent to all quest's 
partecipants. This is very useless, but again: we have scavenged cpu cycles, 
and taking such a picture is not a realtime job. So, the grid will schedule 
the stuff, and the picture will arrive as soon as the grid is able to 
retrieve allthe subjobs done. And maybe to pay for it if it is in very high 
res, for example... :)

Could you think other uses of scavenged cpu cycles?

-- 
Andrea Negro

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