Show logo

What Can Video Games Teach Us About Edge Computing?

  |  Compiler team  
Edge computing

Compiler • • What Can Video Games Teach Us About Edge Computing? | Compiler

What Can Video Games Teach Us About Edge Computing? | Compiler

About the episode

From button-mashing brawlers to massive battle royales, there’s a lot of fun to be had in online gaming. That is, if players’ connections are reliable. If you’ve ever dealt with input delay, or wrestled with lag, you know how important a quality connection is in online gaming. But with edge computing on the horizon, what impact might there be on how we play?

The internet, as we’ve explored in past seasons of Command Line Heroes, is a patchwork of international agreements and varying infrastructure. But there’s something coming to change the ways we connect. In this episode of Compiler, we explore what edge computing could mean for people who enjoy video games, and what this form of entertainment could teach us about the technology.

Compiler team Red Hat original show

Abonnieren

Subscribe here:

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Subscribe via RSS Feed

Transkript

Intro. Let's do it. All right, Kim, what do you have for us today? I wanted to talk today about edge computing. Angela, have you heard anything about edge computing? Oh, yes, actually I have. I didn't really know what it was until about last year when I came to Red Hat and now it's a topic of conversation, so I hear a lot about edge computing. This is one of those topics that I hear a lot of people talking about, but if I'm being honest with myself, I don't know that I could explain it. Cool. Well, I'm hoping to explain a little bit more about it then. And today, I want to use kind of an unconventional lens to take a look at edge computing. And what's that? Video games. All right, let's do it. Fantastic. This is Compiler. An original podcast from Red Hat. We're your hosts. I'm Brent Simoneaux. And I'm Angela Andrews. We're here to break down questions from the tech industry—big, small, and, sometimes, strange. Today's question: What can video games teach us about edge computing? Producer Kim Huang is here to help us out. Okay. Before I get into video games, and I promise this is going to pay off, I need to know something. Sure. What do you need? How many pizza places do you have near you? Too many. There's one on every corner, almost. How about you, Brent? Yeah. I live in a city downtown and there are one, two, three... There are four pizza shops within a few blocks distance from me. Okay. So the reason I'm asking is because I spoke with Griffin Ashe. My name is Griffin Ash. I'm a lead architect for Telco and edge computing here at Red Hat. And he had a really interesting way of explaining exactly how edge computing works. Conceptually, or at a very high level, where we like to dissect or start as an entry point for edge computing is it's a movement of compute resources, closer to the devices and people that produce and consume data. He usually gives an example of there being only two pizza spots in the entire country. If there were one or two large pizza shops on the East Coast and the West Coast only, the experience of me ordering, getting delivered, and then consuming a pizza probably wouldn't be that good. Let's play this out, then. I'm hungry. I want to order a pizza. I call the East Coast pizza shop. What happens? If you lived close to the pizza shop, it would probably be a very normal experience. But for mostly everyone else, I guess they would take your order. You would tell them what toppings you wanted. You would tell them if you wanted any sides or any drinks. They would package it all up, give it to a delivery person, and then that delivery person would take it to a plane or a train or a boat, I guess, depending on where you lived. Yum. Boat pizza. And it would take hours, maybe even days, to get to you. And by the time that you got your pizza, I imagine it wouldn't be a very fresh, very hot meal. Edge computing does for data what the pizza shop down the street from my house does from my ability to consume pizza. So in the pizza metaphor, I end up with cold pizza, even though I'm hungry. What does that look like in the real world though, outside of this metaphor? So in the real world, edge computing moves data processing closer to the people that need it. And it's using devices that are already a part of the infrastructure. So users can get a much better experience because you don't have to send data back to a central site for processing, which can impact the performance of the application. Got it. So we have the core concept of what edge computing is. Let's transition a bit and talk about video games. All right. My name is Jared Sprague. So I spoke with Jared Sprague. I'm a principal software engineer at Red Hat. And he really knows his craft, and he's also a member of the gaming COP. And what is the gaming COP? It's the gaming Community of Practice. Think of it as not a formal team, but a group of people who are really enthusiastic about open source technology in gaming. Over the past few years, I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to work on several game-related development projects at Red Hat, mostly around events. Jared and I talked a little bit about how edge can help the experience in video games. And he talked about LAN parties for a little bit. He went to LAN parties? Yes. I've heard of those. What is a LAN party? Brent, a LAN party is when a bunch of people, usually friends, say about six or seven of them, will get together and run a game on a local server. So they'll all get together in the same space, under the same roof, and play a game together, run locally. Does that make sense? Got it. So a group of people in the same space, and all of their computers are connected together. Exactly. And that is the pinnacle of edge computing and gaming, in my opinion, because the two big killers in multiplayer gaming are latency and server load. And when you're in a LAN party, you've solved those two things, because you have almost zero latency. And then you have six to ten people on a single server, so there's practically zero server load. So I spoke with Derek Reese too. My name is Derek Reese. I'm a principal software engineer at Red Hat. And Derek explained to me what latency is. Latency is essentially the amount of time that it takes for data to get from point A to point B. So if I'm a gamer and I'm pressing a button on my controller, that's point A. And point B is when I see my character on the screen react to that button press. Derek told me that the upper limit for what's acceptable in gaming is around 250 milliseconds, but ideally you want it to be around 50 milliseconds or lower. If I press a button on my controller and my character doesn't react for a quarter of a second, I'm going to notice it. And it's going to make the game feel sluggish and unresponsive. And if you're playing against someone else, they might have an advantage over you if their latency is lower than yours. Oh, okay. So that makes a lot of sense. So what else did Derek tell you about, Kim? Well, a lot. So I want to go through, really quickly, Brent, and kind of break down exactly what happens when you press a button on your controller. Okay. Okay. So the first thing you do, press a button to move your character forward. It goes through the game, locally, it gets processed, and then it gets put into something called a packet. And that packet goes out through the home users' internet connection that gets routed to the ISP. The ISP's going to work through its... If there's existing peering agreements, then yay, gets things to where they need to go a lot faster. But in most cases, you're going to get kind of bounced around, based on what the ISP thinks is the most efficient path to the destination server, which is usually hosted at the game company or in a warehouse, or increasingly these days on something like AWS. So whatever your request is, in this case, it would be moving your character forward, that has to travel all the way back from the server to your processor. So this is kind of the equivalent of, say, the East Coast pizza shop, right? Yes. So imagine the pizza delivery guy trying to put into his GPS, the fastest way to get to your house. And maybe the fastest way is a highway with tolls. Maybe it's a highway with no tolls. Maybe it's an older state road with a lot of curves. Maybe it's a mountain back road. It could be a number of different ways to get there, but whatever way that that person takes, it's going to impact the amount of time that you have to wait for your pizza to get there. So it has to go a great distance and that can take some time. What is the alternative? Well... When we're talking about edge, we're kind of circumventing all that. So if you're on your mobile phone, instead of a mobile phone communicating wirelessly to the closest tower and then from the tower to an ISP and from that ISP to the game company after it gets routed all over the place. Instead, your signal makes it to the tower and then there's a box that's on that tower or at the next building over. So you're no longer getting routed all the way to the ISP, but before you even get there, your destination is available and some computational items can just be calculated and sent right back to you with essentially a micro server. In this case, microservices that are responsible for things that don't need to go back to the main server or can be asynchronously connected to the server over time. So maybe when things are less busy, that data can be synced back upstream. These edge accounts could work for a real-time strategy game, like StarCraft, where the AI runs on a player's computer and it's a pretty intensive load. So if the load is intensive and the player's computer is processing everything locally, you're going to run to kind of an upward limit as to what that AI can do. But if you offload that to a server in some type of edge infrastructure, all of a sudden you can play StarCraft against a very sophisticated AI. Oh, wow. So it ends up providing this really interesting and robust gameplay as well for end users, right? It definitely broadens the... well, pardon the pun, the playing field, when it comes to gaming experiences. Wow. That's so cool. I want to return us to our original question: What can video games teach us about edge computing? And I'm wondering what you think, Kim? I think that video games are a really good potential use case because they already have these kind of challenges built into what they do. So they already have issues with processing information with trying to balance internet connectivity between two different points, or sometimes multiple points, on a map or in the world. So they're already a very good, rich use case for edge to really make a big impact on the way that they do business and the way that they make games. So there's a lot of implications there. That's kind of why I wanted to talk about edge computing in that lens. This one of those terms that I hear a lot of people talking about. What other industries could this potentially revolutionize? Well, I see a lot of innovation happening with edge computing in healthcare. I see it happening in education. I see it happening in transportation. I mean, I don't think there is an industry out there that couldn't benefit from being able to put data closer to the people who need to use it. I see edge becoming more and more prolific in a lot of these industries just for that reason. There's tons of use cases across all of these verticals, where edge could really be able to move data out of their data centers closer to the people that need it. And that does it for this episode of Compiler. Today's episode was produced by Kim Huang. Victoria Lawton makes sure this show has a pizza place on every single corner, so it's just like a LAN party. Our audio engineer is Kristie Chan. Special thanks to Shawn Cole. Our theme song was composed by Mary Ancheta. Big, big thanks to our guests, Griffin Ashe, Jared Sprague, and Derek Reece. Also a special thank you to Red Hats' gaming COP. They were a big help putting together today's show and you can check out their collection of community built games at arcade.redhat.com. Our audio team includes Leigh Day, Laura Barnes, Claire Alison, Nick Burns, Aaron Williamson, Karen King, Boo Boo Howse, Rachel Ertel, Mike Compton, Ocean Matthews, and Laura Walters. If you liked today's show, please follow us for future episodes. We would love to see you here next time. Love, love, love. Thank you so much for joining us. Bye, y'all. Thanks, everybody.

More about edge computing

Going beyond the traditional datacenter, and bringing services closer to where they are needed. Edge computing provides advantages in addressing latency, real-time performance, and overall customer experiences. 

Blog

Neuerungen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 für Edge Computing

18. Mai 2022  |  

...

Edge Computing

Blog

Industrie 4.0 und OT-Transformation: Technologien, Vorteile und Herausforderungen

23. Februar 2022  |  

...

Edge Computing

About the show

Compiler

Do you want to stay on top of tech, but find you’re short on time? Compiler presents perspectives, topics, and insights from the industry—free from jargon and judgment. We want to discover where technology is headed beyond the headlines, and create a place for new IT professionals to learn, grow, and thrive. If you are enjoying the show, let us know, and use #CompilerPodcast to share our episodes.

Learn more about Compiler