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The Mainframe Virtual Universe is Expanding |
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Article by William Hoffman, mainframe-upgrade.com
Published June 2007, Copyright © 2007 mainframe-upgrade.com
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The Mainframe Virtual Universe is Expanding |
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This Mainframe Virtual World is becoming a reality and it reinforces how modern the old dinosaur is becoming ! In this market the mainframe's strength is its ability to service millions of simultaneous users efficiently, which is what you need if we are all going to forget global warming and disappear into our "second life" and ditch the first!
In a hookup with the Brazilian software developer Hoplon Infotainment, IBM is conjuring up a "Cell Broadband Engine" for the mainframe to better position itself for serving up the huge online virtual worlds and online games that are proving so popular.
Hoplon Infotainment has for some time pioneered the use of IBM Mainframe technology for Online Gaming. The Linux®- and IBM DB2®-based TaikoDom game is hosted by IBM on an IBM eServer® zSeries® 900. TaikoDom is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) set in space, where you can pilot spaceships and run space stations in a massively rich virtual cosmos.
In this Cell/B.E partnership with Hoplon, IBM are creating new specialty mainframes that will run Hoplon's online world middleware solution, called bitVerse, which is currently under development. The Cell Broadband Engine will handle the basic virtual world physics such as gravity and air resistance and take on the process heavy graphics and calculation heavy applications. This will give the fast performance required for the smooth running of these "other realities".
The Cell/B.E was first announced in 2006 and was jointly developed by IBM, Sony Corporation, Sony Computer Entertainment, and Toshiba, and is a "blade" computing system made up of different "specialty processors" used to do different tasks. Sony of course was in there because of its experience in developing the PlayStation 3's Cell processor, and a lot of that architecture has been worked into this mainframe engine.
Of course the other mainframe benefits such as security and scalability are very important advantages that online virtual world and gaming enterprises will get as part of the package when they go down the mainframe route. These will be very attractive, and no doubt we are entering the world of virtual world crime and the stealing of second life identities, and can you imagine the psychological trauma for someone immersed in their virtual online universe for years only to find that one day that it has crashed in a horrendous server collapse !
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