Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Stephen John Butler

Graham Andrew Ruffell

Rico Mariani

John Raymond Justice

Tara Sanathanan Prakriya

John Clement Gudenkauf

Stefan Keir Gordon

Joshua Boehm

Dave Lalor

Systems and methods are provided for optimizing allocation of client devices, such as gaming devices, to different available data centers and servers, such as gaming servers, within a data center. The allocation maintains a satisfactory user experience while balancing costs and resource usage. Embodiments of the invention match a client to a data center and server based on a set of criteria related to the client device, user of the client device, game or application the user desires to play, available data centers for supporting the client device, and conditions of the network between the client device and data center. An allocation algorithm may be used to determine resource-efficient allocation. In one embodiment, a bidding process is employed wherein a client and data center are matched based on bids received from data centers. In one embodiment, allocation is periodically evaluated to determine if reassignment to another data center is needed.

Assigning a player to a machine

A method and system are provided for incrementally maintaining digital information using change notifications. A content store provides change notifications corresponding to changes to the data within the store to an event broadcaster. One or more modules store a subset of the content data for publication and receive the change notifications over a message queue bus. The modules process the change notifications and generate events for redistribution by the event broadcaster. The events may include publishing updated content by the modules.

Method and system for incrementally maintaining digital content using events

A system and method employ a hierarchical data structure wherein nodes in the structure have a parent/child as well as a temporal relationship. Accordingly, the parent-child relationship of various nodes may change as a function of time. This hierarchical structure is part of a system employed to schedule content on a web site or web page that changes over time.

System and method for web-based content scheduling

Growing community of inventors

Chichester, United Kingdom

Stephen John Butler