This dissertation, "An Architecture to Support Scalable Distributed Virtual Environment Systems on Grid" by Tianqi, Wang, 王天琦, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled "An Architecture to Support Scalable Distributed Virtual Environment Systems on Grid" Submitted by Tianqi WANG for the degree of Master of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in September 2004 ADistributedVirtualEnvironment(DVE)systemcreatesacomputer-generated virtual world in which individuals located at different places can interact with one another. In order to achieve real-time response for a large user base, a designofanarchitecturethatsupportsscalabilityisneeded. Anumberofstudies have been conducted, but the proposed solutions can not always produce good performance for a dynamic DVE system where users can move and act freely in a virtual environment. Inthisthesis, wepresentthedesignofagrid-enabledserviceorientedframe- work to facilitate the building of DVE systems on grid. A service component called a gamelet is proposed. A gamelet is characterized by its load awareness, high mobility, and embedded synchronization. Based on gamelets, we show how tore-designtheexistingmonopolisticmodelofaDVEsystemsothatitbecomes an open and service-oriented system that can fit into the current Grid/OGSA framework. Wealsopresentanadaptivegameletload-balancing(AGL)algorithmthat can help the DVE system to achieve better performance. We evaluate the performance through a multiplayer online game prototype implemented using the Globus Toolkit. The results show that our approach can achieve a faster response time and a higher throughput than existing systems. DOI: 10.5353/th_b3147337 Subjects: Computational grids (Computer systems)Virtual computer systemsElectronic data processing - Distributed processingComputer architecture