IBM's GRID in action: sign of things to come?

[zurich]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1227247,00.asp

GameGrid dynamically partitions areas of the game map, including players and objects, onto different servers. If a player or object, such as a rocket, moves from one server to another, the first server sends the player's state—the player's name, vector, velocity, and statistics—from one server to the next. When doing so, IBM's GameGrid software typically operated with latencies of 50 microseconds or less, according to Hammer.
IBM researchers performed the demonstration by color-coding objects to match the specific server. Even if a player isn't physically "on" a server, he must still be able to "see" objects stored on another. The Quake code determines the state of the world every tenth of a second, Bethencourt said.

If a group of players collects in some corner of the map, the grid software balances the load, redividing the map between servers so that no one server becomes overloaded, Hammer said. "It's a good system to handle load balancing," Hammer said.

I always thought inactive/standby PS3s connected on broadband would make for an interesting server farm concept

 

[cthellis42]

Certainly sounds good to me.

Is this a part of their "Butterfly" project that's been talked about before, you think?

 

[DeadmeatGA]

...

From the context of article it seems that UW students just did a clustered version of Quake server in which identical sever processes load-balance by redistributing game objects among themselves. This is rather easy to achieve.

This is not what I was looking from CELL, I was looking forward to single application distributed over several processors, each part handling the different portion of program; this is much harder to achieve and IBM's environment does not provide any kind of auto-parallelization support.

3rd party developers are going to have a nightmare when Kutaragi unveils it for the first time, the first word from their mouth being "How the hell am I supposed to code for that beast???"

I will write a mini CELL FAQ to help understand others what it is from a developer's point of view.

 

[Paul]

3rd party developers are going to have a nightmare when Kutaragi unveils it for the first time, the first word from their mouth being "How the hell am I supposed to code for that beast???"

With the middleware and API Sony provides them with. Sony isn't stupid, they admitted their mistakes. Take a look at PSP, it's being touted by Sony to be similar to code like the original playstation.

 

[MfA]

To be quite fair DeadmeatGA, it was Kutaragi who started about this networked computing BS when talking about Cell.

Zurich, do you plan to have your PS3 in some building other than your home connected to other PS3s over real broadband?

I hope devs start using scalable servers on their clusters though, they seem to be mostly using static loadbalancing now.

 

[zurich]

Zurich, do you plan to have your PS3 in some building other than your home connected to other PS3s over real broadband?

Nope, it'll live where it is now, just with all the distributed broadband application buzzword jargon, I thought that standby PS3s would make a neat cluster server for online games

Ofcourse, not everyone's broadband line is as slick as mine

 

[London Geezer]

Ofcourse, not everyone's broadband line is as slick as mine

we know... ur broadband line isnt the only thing that's slicker than average..................
oh god cant believe i said that.
cant believe i'm actually gonna post it