In an effort to kick up performance for their MMORPG guild, high energy physicists at CERN and CalTech have developed a fast data transfer methodology using Java and the immense data pipes of the National Lambda Rail project. They used MonALISA to monitor and optimize their throughput. No one got eaten by a grue, so the experiment was deemed successful.

The MonALISA system is designed as an ensemble of autonomous multi-threaded, self-describing agent-based subsystems which are registered as dynamic services, and are able to collaborate and cooperate in performing a wide range of information gathering and processing tasks. These agents can analyze and process the information, in a distributed way, to provide optimization decisions in large scale distributed applications. An agent-based architecture provides the ability to invest the system with increasing degrees of intelligence, to reduce complexity and make global systems manageable in real time. The scalability of the system derives from the use of multithreaded execution engine to host a variety of loosely coupled self-describing dynamic services or agents and the ability of each service to register itself and then to be discovered and used by any other services, or clients that require such information. The system is designed to easily integrate existing monitoring tools and procedures and to provide this information in a dynamic, customized, self describing way to any other services or clients.