In my PhD, I focused on increasing the scalability of modifiable virtual environment (MVE) instances.
To this end, I designed several novel systems and approaches:
I designed Servo, the first system to leverage serverless (and in particular FaaS) computing to improve the scalability and performance of game instances.
By identifying and isolating predictable parts of the game’s simulation, Servo can use computational offloading to allow fine-grained horizontal scaling within a single game instance,
increasing the number of supported players by up to 15×.
Another research highlight is my work on Dyconits, a novel consistency model based on conits that enables using tunable consistency for online games and virtual worlds.
Dyconits is unique in that it simultaneously supports quantifying inconsistency, optimistically bounding inconsistency, and automatic policy-based consistency tuning.
Specifically, Dyconits can temporarily allow increased inconsistency to accommodate workload peaks and avoid performance degradation,
and increases the number of supported players by up to 40%.
To allow quantitative research on games such as Minecraft, I created Yardstick [1, 2], a distributed benchmark for Minecraft-like games.
Yardstick is the first benchmark of its kind,
and allows comparing the performance of alternative implementations of games that implement the Minecraft network protocol.
To evaluate system scalability, Yardstick uses scalable workloads of emulated players.
Using Yardstick, we showed that Minecraft-like games scale poorly (a few hundred players under good conditions) and that player modifications to the virtual world can cause significant performance degradations and system crashes (because the world is effectively programmable).
I am happy to have collaborated with many students during these research projects.
Most of these collaborations led to master’s and bachelor’s theses, and some helped students get their first scientific publication.
More about supervision highlights
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Publications
2024
Towards a Workload Trace Archive for Metaverse SystemsRadu Apsan, Damla Ural, Paul Daniëlse, Vlad-Andrei Cursaru, Eames Trinh,
Jesse Donkervliet, Alexandru Iosup
Companion of the 15th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, ICPE 2024, London, United Kingdom, May 7-11, 2024https://doi.org/10.1145/3629527.3651421 2023
Servo: Increasing the Scalability of Modifiable Virtual Environments Using Serverless ComputingJesse Donkervliet, Javier Ron, Junyan Li, Tiberiu Iancu, Cristina L. Abad, Alexandru Iosup
43rd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2023, Hong Kong, July 18-21, 2023https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS57875.2023.00075 Meterstick: Benchmarking Performance Variability in Cloud and Self-Hosted Minecraft-Like GamesJerrit Eickhoff,
Jesse Donkervliet, Alexandru Iosup
Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, ICPE 2023, Coimbra, Portugal, April 15-19, 2023https://doi.org/10.1145/3578244.3583724 Can My WiFi Handle the Metaverse? a Performance Evaluation of Meta’s Flagship Virtual Reality HardwareMatthijs Jansen,
Jesse Donkervliet, Animesh Trivedi, Alexandru Iosup
Companion of the 2023 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, ICPE 2023, Coimbra, Portugal, April 15-19, 2023https://doi.org/10.1145/3578245.3585022 Servo: Increasing the Scalability of Modifiable Virtual Environments Using Serverless Computing - Extended Technical ReportJesse Donkervliet, Javier Ron, Junyan Li, Tiberiu Iancu, Cristina L. Abad, Alexandru Iosup
CoRRhttps://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.00032 2022
Meterstick: Benchmarking Performance Variability in Cloud and Self-Hosted Minecraft-Like GamesJerrit Eickhoff,
Jesse Donkervliet, Alexandru Iosup
International IEEE Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, ISPASS 2022, Singapore, May 22-24, 2022https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPASS55109.2022.00018 Efficiently Improving the Performance of Serverless Applications With Microtask-Based SchedulingSacheendra Talluri, Sven Lankester, Bogdan Ene,
Jesse Donkervliet, Animesh Trivedi, Alexandru Iosup
15th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing, UCC 2022, Vancouver, WA, USA, December 6-9, 2022https://doi.org/10.1109/UCC56403.2022.00066 2021
Dyconits: Scaling Minecraft-Like Services Through Dynamically Managed InconsistencyJesse Donkervliet, Jim Cuijpers, Alexandru Iosup
41st IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2021, Washington DC, USA, July 7-10, 2021https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS51616.2021.00021 An Empirical Evaluation of the Performance of Video Conferencing SystemsRichard Bieringa, Abijith Radhakrishnan, Tavneet Singh, Sophie Vos,
Jesse Donkervliet, Alexandru Iosup
ICPE ’21: ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, Virtual Event, France, April 19-21, 2021, Companion Volumehttps://doi.org/10.1145/3447545.3451186 An Empirical Evaluation of Video Conferencing Systems Used in Industry, Academia, and EntertainmentJim Cuijpers, Kelvin Elsendoorn, Ean-Dan Tjon-Joek-Tjien, Riccardo Iesari, Federico Casenove,
Jesse Donkervliet, Alexandru Iosup
ICPE ’21: ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, Virtual Event, France, April 19-21, 2021, Companion Volumehttps://doi.org/10.1145/3447545.3451174 Meterstick: Benchmarking Performance Variability in Cloud and Self-Hosted Minecraft-Like Games Extended Technical ReportJerrit Eickhoff,
Jesse Donkervliet, Alexandru Iosup
CoRRhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06963 2020
2019
Yardstick: A Benchmark for Minecraft-Like ServicesJerom Sar,
Jesse Donkervliet, Alexandru Iosup
Proceedings of the 2019 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, ICPE 2019, Mumbai, India, April 7-11, 2019https://doi.org/10.1145/3297663.3310307 2015
Self-Expressive Management of Business-Critical Workloads in Virtualized DatacentersVincent Beek,
Jesse Donkervliet, Tim Hegeman, Stefan Hugtenburg, Alexandru Iosup
Computerhttps://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2015.206 2014
Massivizing Online Games Using Cloud Computing: A VisionAlexandru Iosup, Siqi Shen, Yong Guo, Stefan Hugtenburg,
Jesse Donkervliet, Radu Prodan
2013 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo Workshops, Chengdu, China, July 14-18, 2014https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMEW.2014.6890684 Service