A friend of mine did some research for DARPA/NSF on internet 'crowds.' His research was looking at the question of fractal gatherings, which was basically you were 'near' the people around you in the virtual 3D space and could hear what they were saying, you were adjacent to people who were one space away but could hear them if they 'shouted' and the crowd was at a gathering that was sharing an experience from a presenter who was 'projected'. Basically a virtual concert venue for example where process affinity scheduling took into account where you "were" in the 3D space. The questions are many and as far as I can tell the folks who research this are few and far between.
Process migration continues to be a hard thing to do. VMware and others have made progress, virtualized interfaces and peripherals, self contained 'state'. Works 'ok' at the VM level but still doesn't work at all AFAIK at the 'thread' level.
World of Warcraft addresses this somewhat by 'instances' which is that under certain circumstances (entering a dungeon for example) you and your party of 5, 10, 25, or 40 people all transition (through a loading screen) into a place with nobody else (except you). They can dedicate machines to host an instance and do process migration at that level.
DARPA is interested of course because they would love to have a way of connecting warfighters into a virtual command and control center regardless of where they are physically. Essentially being in two places at once is a big force multiplier.
A friend of mine did some research for DARPA/NSF on internet 'crowds.' His research was looking at the question of fractal gatherings, which was basically you were 'near' the people around you in the virtual 3D space and could hear what they were saying, you were adjacent to people who were one space away but could hear them if they 'shouted' and the crowd was at a gathering that was sharing an experience from a presenter who was 'projected'. Basically a virtual concert venue for example where process affinity scheduling took into account where you "were" in the 3D space. The questions are many and as far as I can tell the folks who research this are few and far between.
Process migration continues to be a hard thing to do. VMware and others have made progress, virtualized interfaces and peripherals, self contained 'state'. Works 'ok' at the VM level but still doesn't work at all AFAIK at the 'thread' level.
World of Warcraft addresses this somewhat by 'instances' which is that under certain circumstances (entering a dungeon for example) you and your party of 5, 10, 25, or 40 people all transition (through a loading screen) into a place with nobody else (except you). They can dedicate machines to host an instance and do process migration at that level.
DARPA is interested of course because they would love to have a way of connecting warfighters into a virtual command and control center regardless of where they are physically. Essentially being in two places at once is a big force multiplier.