Transactional Video Games

Master project

Students will build a parallel version of an open source video game using latest concurrent programming technologies—Software Transactional Memory (STM). Video games have been identified as software that could greatly benefit from the STM paradigm as processor manufacturers make turn to multi-core chips. The focus of the project will be on making simulation parts of a selected video game parallel, as opposed to graphical processing which is already parallelized in specialized graphical processors. Some of the games whose source is freely available are: Corewar, Tierra, Crobots, Globulation, Liquid War, XBattle and PokerTH. We are also open to suggestions from students, as long as the games are freely available in source form and allow to somehow measure performance of the synchronization mechanism.

Language: C/C++

Responsible: Aleksandar Dragojevic

Project intended for 1 student