In our corner of the universe, considerable coverage has been given this past week of IBM's announced new mainframe platform based on the Cell processor (PlayStation 3) that is designed to support virtual worlds (and related) applications. Beneath the fold I'll provide a sampling of links.
Mark Wallace (3DPoint) provides an excellent round of introductory coverage:
- "New IBM Mainframe Platform For Virtual Worlds"
- "More on IBM’s Mainframe for Virtual Worlds" (featuring an interview with David Gelardi, IBM’s vice president of industry solutions).
Also:
- CNet, "IBM to wed game chip with mainframes."
- eWeek.com, "IBM Mainframes Go 3-D."
Humor:
Previous and related:
- TN: CCP Case Study. IBM Blade Servers and virtual worlds.
Another possibility is of course setting up P2P grid of PS3s or other Cell-powered machines... ;)
Posted by: gaijin | Apr 30, 2007 at 06:38
I expect it's an amazing SL metaverse thing.
Cell-powered penises!
Posted by: Rich Bryant | Apr 30, 2007 at 12:00
One thing that should be to note, that the Cell processors are built around the the concept of Vector Math not Floating Points. For those who don't know, this works great for doing 3D and things like Seti@Home but doesn't do things like Databases, Network Replication or AI. The Database work, Replication and AI would be done on the stripped down PPC processor that is included. Now the big problem with all this is that the current popular train of practice is for the end user to do the Heavy work (3D and Rendering) and for the Servers to do the CPU Intensive stuff (The Rest ie Replication and AI systems). So these servers would essentially be the complete oposite of what is required to make a strong MMO server. IMHO This is a hype machine at work more then a revolution to the server industry.
Posted by: Jesse | Apr 30, 2007 at 13:19
Unless your AI makes heavy use of vector math. In which case this (or, say, a GPU on the server) could make a lot of sense.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | May 01, 2007 at 14:33