DroidCloud: Scalable High Density Android (TM) Cloud Rendering

Cloud rendering is an emerging technology in which rendering-heavy applications run on the cloud server and then stream the rendered contents to the end-user device. High density and high scalability of the cloud rendering services are crucial to support millions of users concurrently and cost-effectively. However, it is still challenging to run Android OS in cloud smoothly with high density and high scalability without compromising user experience. This paper presents DroidCloud, the first open-source Android(1) cloud rendering solution focusing on the scalable design and density aspect optimization to the best of our knowledge. To cloudify Android OS, DroidCloud utilizes the vHAL technology in order to support remote devices and keep transparent to Android applications. And a Flexible rendering scheduling policy is introduced to break the boundary of GPU physical locations. Thus, both remote GPUs and local GPUs can accommodate render tasks by forwarding rendering tasks and making it possible to support multiple Android OSes with GPU acceleration. Besides, to further improve the density, DroidCloud optimizes the resource cost both in a single instance and across instances. We show in this paper that DroidCloud can run hundreds of Android OSes on a single Intel (R) Xeon (R) server with GPU acceleration simultaneously, increasing the density at the scale of one order of magnitude compared to current cloud gaming systems. Further experimental results demonstrate that DroidCloud can transparently run Android applications at native speed with lower CPU, memory, and storage utilization.