Assignment of games to servers in the OnLive cloud game system

Abstract

OnLive is a thin-client, cloud-based, video game streaming service. As part of their service, OnLive must distribute game content to their servers in a manner that provides good performance for the players while using hardware resources effectively. In order to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of their game distribution strategies, we built a simulator for OnLive's service and modeled their current game distribution strategy. Using a hill-climbing algorithm, we constructed game distribution strategies with improved abilities to meet customer demand while significantly reducing disk space requirements.