More on Grid Computing and Gaming

securitas writes "Sony, IBM and Butterfly.net will announce and demonstrate a new grid computing network for PS2 online gaming at the Game Developers Conference next week. The network is based on Linux and the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and is designed to support millions of players. This is believed to be the first major consumer application of grid technology. Read the details at the NY Times, CNET and the Washington Post."

Comments

I didn't know what a "grid" was

[Amsterdam Vallon]

... so I looked up some simple details.

"Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of resources distributed across "multiple" administrative domains based on their (resources) availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements."

So, this project would essentially create one of the above distributed systems using simple, low-cost console gaming systems.

I remember reading awhile ago that Iraq wanted Playstations in order to grid them together and create supercomputers from 99 dollar American gaming devices.

This is cool stuff IMHO

[Chitlenz]

Oracle has published a toolkit and several white papers about this technology. It is NOT just for games, and I've been watching this evolve along with their (Oracle's, not the globus project's)RAC technology as a cost efffective way to replace more our more expensive SUN hardware when we outgrow it. In particular, the idea of dispersing large ERP and data warehousing queries to perhaps several groups of inexpensive internal clusters (read: on our LAN) is very appealing, since you could in theory offset new hardware purchases by sharing time between systems. For those interested in perhaps theoretical distributed database applications (for the moment), Oracle has a site here:

http://otn.oracle.com/products/oracle9i/grid_com pu ting/content.html

What is Grid Computing?

[pridkett]

I've seen a ton of questions asking what Grid computing is. The most common one being how does it differ from parallel/distributed computing?

First off, I highly suggest reading The anatomy of the Grid by Ian Foster et. al. It provides a pretty good overview into this whole Grid thing.

But for the lazy, here's a little bit. The Grid is more than parallel computing. Typically with parallel/distributed computing the problem or resources are static or both. Grid allows both of these to change. In a nutshell, Grid computing means not having to worry about where the compute resources are. Just start a calculation and it gets done. Just like how you don't worry where your power comes from, you just plug in.

The core of the Grid is virtual organizations. Under a VO, I could get together with a few friends and pool our resources. We could set up a registry and some factories (I'm speaking OGSA here, but whatever) and create some certificates. Then, we could submit jobs to the Grid and not have to worry about the resources that they're running on.

GSI provides some really nifty security features (based on X.509 I believe). Basically you provide a mapping that allows other authorized users to run commands on your computer. When you're on the Grid you create a proxy for your certificate that is passed to the process that you run on this other computer. Then if that computer needs more resources, it can create another proxy certificate and delegate to another server.

Also, Grid computing is more than just computing. There is data storage and instrumentation sharing also. You might want to check out PPDG, GriPhyN and TeraGrid for examples of these systems.

If you're interested in playing with the GRID, you can go download Globus Toolkit 3.0 Alpha or the Java CoG Kit which is a pure Java implementation of Globus 2.x (it's much easier to install than the regular Globus 2.2.x).

Re:Console breakdown, reality crashes in...

[deemah]

There's more to this debate than pure numbers. The PS2 and the GameCube have radically different architectures to the Xbox.

In fact, in your list, the only numbers that can actually be used as a measure of performance are those of the PC-like Xbox.

If I were to describe the PS2 as having three processors working in parallel, each with their own on board memory and two of them able to operate on vectors directly, you might start to see how it differs from a PC concept.

Similarly with vRAM. The PS2 has a 'measly' 4Mb of video ram but it also has the ability to stream textures in and out of it faster than a frame can be drawn. This gives you a much larger 'virtual' vRAM.