Game Research Grid

More news than you can shake a stick at today. The latest: The San Diego Supercomputer Center,
the Cal-(IT)2 Game Culture & Technology Lab, the UC-Irvine Institute for Software Research, and Butterfly.net announce a Massively Multi-User Online Grid-Based Game System for Game Research. It will be rolled out on Thursday, October 30 at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at UC-Irvine in Orange County, CA. Speaking of California, I'm not sure if we are all working our abs or our pecs that day. Maybe gluts. Anyway, press are clearly encouraged to attend, and academics will want to red-pen November 15th, when the group begins accepting research proposals. Address queries about attending the workshop to [email protected]

Comments

[Dave Rickey]

1.

Back when Butterfly was first announced, I commented that as an unproven platform, it was a non-starter as a server infrastructure choice. If Turbine couldn't sell their proven system, nobody was going to bet millions on a prototype so they could be the lab rat, no matter how high it's theoretical cost-efficiency was supposed to be. Butterfly will inevitably need a lot of shakedown before it's really ready to run a commercial game.

Looks like they're trying to get out of that chicken-and-egg situation with this, an "academic research" game would have many of the same needs, which will let them work out the kinks, while not having anything committed but post-grad coding time. Should be a good deal for all concerned. Lord knows it would be convenient to pull a server off the shelf the same way we can buy a graphics engine.

--Dave