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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."
X-Box online is a Major selling point for the X-Box right now. I'm surprised Sony didn't come up with anything similar earlier.
"Butterfly uses a "grid computing" approach, in which multiple servers work together as a virtual supercomputer, seamlessly shifting processing tasks among individual machines."
How is this different from Parallel computing?
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is there really a major selling-point for the Xbox?!?
support millions of players
That's gonna be crowded on the GranTurisma race tracks...
I want my karma, and I want it now!
Sounds like MSN 8... Hope Sony's not going to get sued by MS for trademark infringement.
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It's not! As far as I can discern the only difference is in the length (and quantity) of the connections. Parallel computing normal involves a local cluster of computers (LAN, eg a Beowulf type project) whilst the Grid works on the SETI type system of enlisting processing power across the internet (WAN) - ie many more processors separated by greater differences. Note these are comparative terms so you decide what's a Grid and what's an MPP
Whatis says: Grid computing requires the use of software that can divide and farm out pieces of a program to as many as several thousand computers. Grid computing can be thought of as distributed and large-scale cluster computing and as a form of network-distributed parallel processing. It can be confined to the network of computer workstations within a corporation or it can be a public collaboration (in which case it is also sometimes known as a form of peer-to-peer computing).
pbhj
It seems to me that the more technology these companies throw at games, the less I feel the desire to play them. Don't get me wrong: I love excellent graphics and sound. I just think the playability suffers when a game developer spends so much effort on the technology. I'm glad we have such a scalable platform for online gaming. I just haven't seen games that are as compelling as they used to be to take advantage of the platform. Am I getting too old for video games?
Another application would be in natural language processors. They require huge databases and computing power to process them. A grid would be a perfect way to build such a system.
Mind you, these applications are equally commercially viable. You could charge say $1000 per game against the world champion chess program, or $100 for 30 minutes of conservation with the most intelligent bot ever, and so on.
... 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.
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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:
m pu ting/content.html
http://otn.oracle.com/products/oracle9i/grid_co
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
ARPANET was about creating a network that was resiliant to bad things.
There are parallels. When an arpanet node goes down routing takes place on the other nodes instead.
In a grid there are many nodes. Some have speciallized resources that are fairly single point of failure suseptable (e.g. mass storage systems, large experimental devices), but most can be supplanted by another node.
That's where the analogy stops though. Where arpanet was concerned with networking, grids are concerned with networking on in that they use them. They are really about job movement, data movement, resource discovery and _security_.
ARPANET was about creating a network that was resiliant to bad things.
No, it wasn't. This myth is till being purpetuated, even though it has been debunked by the original developers of ARAPNET themselves many times over.
ARPANET was designed to link together a whole bunch of very expensive, DoD funded computing centers. It turned out that packet switching was a really great way to do this efficiently. Now, while early packet switching research at RAND in the 50's was concerned with building a survivable communications network, it was irrelvent for as applied to ARPANET.
I recomend the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late for more information.
However no one I've spoken to has the slightest clue as to how they plan on using this Grid stuff. Does anyone know any details? All I see are people saying 'no bandwidth, latency', etc.... I still can't figure out what it's supposed to do. Which is maybe on purpose.
If you look at the chess pieces on the board, so to speak... MS with Xbox, MSN, flavours of XP with media/TV style abilities... then Sony, aligned with IBM for a new chip and a radical new network... not to mention the Cell sharing some tech with IBM's forthcoming Power derivatives for Apple...
Strange things are afoot at the Circle K...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
The OGSA stuff is not necessarily about distributed computing, although the emphasis is certainly placed on this aspect in their docs.
:-)
The basic service a Grid infrastructure can provide to gamers is "peer groups": you can discover groups of people willing to share a game online, and join their group, and chat and play with them, without having to log on to a central server.
You could then imaging sharing add-ons and various other files with your peer group, again without using any central server.
The next step would of course be sharing the actual CPU time of all the devices, for example to keep your characters "alive" even when your console is switched off. And then you'll receive an SMS whenever he gets attacked
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).
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Shamelessly stolen from www.gridcomputing.com...
What is a Grid?In June, I attended the Grid Computing Planet conference in San Jose, California and I was suprised to learn that people even call cluster as grid. I believe that it is a marketing hype. Here is my definition of the Grid, which is based on my presentation as part of the "Understanding the Grid" panel:
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.
If distributed resources happen to be managed by a single, global centralised scheduling system, then it is a cluster. In cluster, all nodes work cooperatively with common goal and objective as the resource allocation is performed by a centralised, global resource manager. In Grid, each node has its own resource manager and allocation policy. Some of these points are being highlighted in my panel presentation at P2P 2002 conference.
Note: "multiple" administrative domains can exist within a single organisation. For example, two clusters managed by their own resource managers within an university can form a grid.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
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.
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Sorry but this is misleading, the CPU's for the PS2 and GC are both specifically designed for games, the xbox is still more powerful but it is a lot closer than those numbers represent.
The xbox is running a x86 intel chip, I'm sure most of us here don't need to be reminded that the current x86 chips we use today are descendants of of chips designed purely to crunch numbers for business applications. Quite a lot of CPU cycles are wasted in current computers, if you were trying to design a CPU for an interactive entertainment system you would not design it like an x86 chip.
Also the fact that the PS2 is 18 months older than the xbox explains why it's spec seems to be unimpressive.
When presented with the facts, it's clear which machine is superior and which machine is using latent technology.
Cuz we all know that CPU MGz is the defining performance factor, and that theoretical polygon count is the same as actual polygon count.
Currently the Xbox has the most power, but the least utility.
Define "utility".
nobody has really pushed the box to it's limits in a game
Let me guess, Microsoft told you that?
I actually own both consoles. Yes, Xbox wins out graphically, but not by leaps and bounds. PS2's only flaw is its poor texturing ability and lack of hardware shaders for surface effects. But good devs like Naughty Dog and Rockstar (with GTA:VC) are coming up with some nice software graphical implementations. And in the end, it really is about the games, and PS2 continues to dominate in that respect, although Xbox is slowly getting better.
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Just so you know...
The Polygon count specified for PS2 & XBox are optimum but not "real-world" while the GC polygon count is "real-world". The numbers are actually fairly even across the board.
The CPU for the PS2 & GC are also designed for games, which the XBox is not. This makes a huge difference.
It boils down to this:
Sony relies on different numbers, the number of people who own a PS2 and the number of games available. Which is why the PS2 is #1 in games sold, by a huge margin.
Nintendo doesn't rely on numbers at all, it relies on games to speak for the quality of the GC. Which is why the Gamecube is by far the most profitable of the current systems, despite selling less games than the PS2.
XBox is relying on the argument the TurboGrax and other failed products rely on: "Better" hardware. They need to focus on more games if they want any market-share. Which is why Microsoft is in last place world-wide and losing a fortune.
It's the games, stupid.
Nosce te Ipsum
I'm just taking a guess here. They brought the world EverCra^H^H^HQuest. It's hugely popular. Then they brought it to the Playstation 2. Sort of a proof of concept. Can we get regular home consumers to play EverQuest in their living room?. Now we have the head of the Playstation projects complaining that they're not going to have the technology to do what they want to do in the next generation of Playstation.
So they have to resort to grid computing. I'm not talking about parallel computing, where all these computers work together to accomplish tasks in a linear fashion cut up over different computers.
They've proved that online works with consoles (as have others, but anyways...). More and more people are getting broadband. Hard drives are a must to hold data, as a memory card is for game saves, not for world contents.
This leads me to my next idea. Everybody gets a PS3, and it supports grid computing. You put the game in, and you plug YOUR WORLD into the online grid. People can visit your world. Take a game like The Sims (god forbid -- I haven't played EverQuest so I'll use The Sims). Everyone has a different house, and the connections are transparent. There is no central repository where everybody meets. Instead of people meeting at one place, they all go their separate ways and meet up with disparate lands housed mostly on a single person's PS2. You plug into the grid, your world, your contributions, your skills, your "power" (as in electricity, as an analogy) is fed to the entire grid, and everyone can benefit from it.
No more arranging rendezvous points. You want to play with a friend, you go to his console online. Strangers walk by, and they aren't fed data from the server -- they're fed data from you. The server manages the protocols and game updates, but everyone who has the game contributes a piece of the puzzle. If one of your friends unplugs his machine from the grid, you lose a core piece of your game. No more lands stored on disc. They're all on the hard drive, and are created and grown by you to give to other people in an online experience.
Or I could be full of shit. I know I'm going to regret not posting AC...
All numbers and specs aside, the XBox looks better (to me, YMMV) and is smoother, followed closely by the 'Cube and the PS2 brings up the rear.
The ability to use custom soundtracks and never needing a memory card is a plus over both the Cube and the PS2. Also, the only real competitor in the graphics department (the Cube) doesn't play DVD's. You might need to buy a remote for it, but at you can use the money you saved by NOT having to buy a seperate braodband adapter.
The XBox live service is nice too. One fee, one login, all my games. The Sony and Nintendo plans will not be so simple or convenient, requiring a different fee for each game you want to play. I doubt I'll even bother getting online with those platforms.
I despise Microsoft's business practices, dislike the Windows OS more and more each day, and think BillG is a weenie in Geek's clothing; that doesn't seem to stop me from admitting that they got the XBox right.
Murphy was an optimist.
Think about the types of systems that a game has.
1) World, Avatar, and Prop Rendering - The grid is not helpful at ALL here. 0 of 10
2) Network communications - The grid could possiblely help with more secure P2P communications - Low score here. 1 of 10
3) AI - The one possilbe place where it could be helpful, but ONLY in limited cases. I would propose two types of AI.
A) Realtime - These are things that you are interacting with, due to possilbe lag and job scheduling delays, I dont see much opportunity here. - 1 of 10
B) Near Realtime - This would be a good fit. The character that no one is interacting with could do smart things, BUT who cares! You are not interacting with them! 3 of 10
4) P2P resource distribution - Another possible target, but no one does this now, and the possability of getting copyrighted materials on your machine will discourage most folks I think.
4 of 10
5) General Instruction Processing - WAY too Slow!
Total score as I see it for the usefulness of grid computing in games 10 of 50. DO NOT DEPLOY at this time!
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I'm sure most of us here don't need to be reminded that the numbers used in business applications are different to the numbers used in games. As an example, I offer for your consideration 19.99, a number most often associated with business applications. It is rare indeed to find such a number as this used in a game.
20, on the other hand, or even 100, are numbers commonly found in computer games. It could be argued that these numbers are found in business applications also, so instead I ask you to consider the venerable pi, or even the square root of two; numbers so intensely game-oriented they come with their own description!
In conclusion, I'd just like to say thank you.