2021 — M2 Internship: Synchronisation-free mobile gaming
Background
In online multi-player games the inherent challenges of mobile and edge
computing are worsened by the requirements of real-time users
interactions. Thus, developers of such applications face difficult
design choices on data storage and distribution that ultimately affect
the gaming experience: adopting a weak consistency model across replicas
and mobile terminals will expose anomalies to the users, whereas a
strong consistency model will increase latency, which may be
unacceptable.
To address these issues, we propose to use Antidote and
EdgeAnt. Antidote is a data store that provides an adequate consistency
semantics with optimal performance by minimizing the need for
synchronization between storage replicas. It offers a causally
consistent transactional API and a toolkit of convergent data types that
accommodates the typical needs of distributed applications. EdgeAnt
extends Antidote with a consistent, mutable cache on the Edge device,
with the same API and consistency guarantees. With support for client
migration, P2P group communication and load placement at the edge or at
the datacenter.
Research objectives and methods
The aim of this project is to design and develop a simple yet
fully-functional gaming application to evaluate the pros and cons of the
synchronization-free approach.
Besides being an interesting pilot study for online multi-player gaming,
this application will allow us to perform a thorough experimental
evaluation of Antidote.
We break down the project into the following steps:
- Brief study of the state of the art.
- Developing a simple, but fully functional, gaming application (e.g. asynchronous
command line chess) with the goal of familiarising with the design, deployment and
APIs of Antidote. - Adaptating an existing open source multi-player gaming application (e.g. 0.AD) that
to use the synchronization-free approach; functional and scalability testing.
How to apply
The intern must:
- Be enrolled in Computer Science / Informatics or a related field.
- Have an excellent academic record.
- Be strongly interested in, and have good knowledge of, distributed systems and/or
distributed games. - Be motivated by experimental research.
The internship is funded, and will take place in the Delys group, at Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris-6 (LIP6), in Paris. It will be advised by Ilyas Toumlilt
<ilyas.toumlilt@lip6.fr> and supervised by Dr. Marc Shapiro. A successful intern will be invited to apply for a PhD. To apply, contact the advisor with the following information:
- A resume or Curriculum Vitæ.
- A list of courses and grades of the last two years of study (an informal transcript is
OK). - Names and contact details of two references (people who can recommend you),
whom we will contact directly.
