A scalable QoS-enabled business Grid Environment for multi-user real-time online interactive applications (EDUTAIN@GRID)

Basic data for this project

Type of project: EU-project hosted outside University of Münster
Duration: 01/09/2006 - 30/09/2009

Description

Edutain@Grid is an exciting and ground breaking new project making use of Grid technology. The project will identify and define a new class of applications that are highly significant for Grid computing but have not been studied in the past, which we characterise as Real-Time Online Interactive Applications (ROIA). The distinctive features that make ROIA unique include large user concurrency to a single application instance, ad-hoc connections, competition-oriented Virtual Organisations, real-time interactive response, dynamically changing control and data application flows whilst maintaining high Quality of Service (QoS), user friendly security, and novel Business-to-Consumer market models. In order to overcome these challenges, the project team will develop a new middleware layer that will allow ROIA to exploit Grid computing and validate the system using two pilot applications from online gaming and e-learning domains. Edutain@Grid is expected to be of key interest to game developers and publishing companies by tackling some current key industry challenges: larger user concurrency and high QoS ranging between 64 - 128 players for fast action online games to thousand of players in persistent Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG); standard API and scalable networks for cheaper integration and online game hosting. Similarly the benefits to the e-learning community are expected to be significant where large numbers of geographically disparate students can interact with instructors making use of large operational data sets. In particular this will be relevant to online simulations in scientific modelling applications used in the energy, defence, transport and legal market sectors. Furthermore Edutain@Grid is expected to attract new developers and development ideas that were not previously possible or simply cost prohibitive.

Keywords: oordination; Cooperation; Telecommunications; Scientific Research; Education; Training; Information Processing; Information Systems