USENIX ATC '24 - High-density Mobile Cloud Gaming on Edge SoC Clusters

High-density Mobile Cloud Gaming on Edge SoC Clusters
Li Zhang, Shangguang Wang, and Mengwei Xu, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
System-on-Chip (SoC) Clusters, i.e., servers consisting of many stacked mobile SoCs, have emerged as a popular platform for serving mobile cloud gaming. Sharing the underlying hardware and OS, these SoC Clusters enable native mobile games to be executed and rendered efficiently without modification. However, the number of deployed game sessions is limited due to conservative deployment strategies and high GPU utilization in current game offloading methods. To address these challenges, we introduce SFG, the first system that enables high-density mobile cloud gaming on SoC Clusters with two novel techniques: (1) It employs a resource-efficient game partitioning and cross-SoC offloading design that maximally preserves GPU optimization intents in the standard graphics rendering pipeline; (2) It proposes an NPU-enhanced game partition coordination strategy to adjust game performance when co-locating partitioned and complete game sessions. Our evaluation of five Unity games shows that SFG achieves up to 4.5× higher game density than existing methods with trivial performance loss. Equally important, SFG extends the lifespan of SoC Clusters, enabling outdated SoC Clusters to serve new games that are unfeasible on a single SoC due to GPU resource shortages.
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