Distributed Graphical Simulation in the Cloud

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel cloud-based architecture for graphical simulations that effectively manages complex data access, load balancing, and failure recovery, enabling high-performance simulation in cloud environments.

Contribution

It introduces a decoupled software architecture for graphical simulations in the cloud, addressing data complexity and fault tolerance issues.

Findings

Successfully runs state-of-the-art simulations in cloud with failures

Enables load balancing and recovery in cloud-based graphical simulations

Demonstrates feasibility of large-scale graphical simulations in cloud environments

Abstract

Graphical simulations are a cornerstone of modern media and films. But existing software packages are designed to run on HPC nodes, and perform poorly in the computing cloud. These simulations have complex data access patterns over complex data structures, and mutate data arbitrarily, and so are a poor fit for existing cloud computing systems. We describe a software architecture for running graphical simulations in the cloud that decouples control logic, computations and data exchanges. This allows a central controller to balance load by redistributing computations, and recover from failures. Evaluations show that the architecture can run existing, state-of-the-art simulations in the presence of stragglers and failures, thereby enabling this large class of applications to use the computing cloud for the first time.