Systems/Enterprise:
ONLINE GAMING INDUSTRY FINALLY GETS A LOAD
OF THE "GRID"
By D.C. Denison, Boston
Are you on the grid
or off the grid?
That's a question you may soon have to answer, particularly if you're
involved with a start-up business, because the idea of "grid computing" is
starting to spread. Just last week a small conference on the topic moved into
the Sheraton Boston Hotel for two days.
What is grid computing? It's an approach that ties together many computers
over the Internet and allows them to act together as one supercomputer.
Some Internet evangelists have been promoting "the grid" since the early
90s. A few scientific and academic research groups are already employing it.
One of the best-known grid experiments is the SETI (Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence) @home project, in which personal computer users
all over the world have joined to volunteer their unused computer power to
crunch signals coming from outer space.
But last week's conference indicates the concept is starting to cross into
the business community. One of the unlikely leaders of the movement: the
online gaming industry.
Among the featured panelists was David Levine, CEO of Butterfly.net, a grid
company that specializes in online gaming. I caught up with him on the opening
day of the conference.
Levine has been a hot property since the spring when he announced a gaming
grid partnership with IBM. As we sat down for a quick lunch, he mentioned he
was frustrated because he wasn't able to meet with all the Boston-based
venture capital groups that wanted to talk to him. He was also shoehorning in
a meeting with publisher Charles River Media about his book, "Practical Grid
Computing for Massively Multiplayer Games," to be published in the spring.
Levine's busy schedule is not surprising. At a time when Microsoft is
having a horrible time introducing Internet-based concepts like Web services
and .Net, Levine's gaming grid is a vivid indication of where grid computing
might be headed, and what it may mean for everyday businesses.
First, it's important to remember that the electronic gaming world is one
of the few technology-related fields that is not in deep recession. A new crop
of online games, including The Sims Online, are about to be launched. This
generation of games is expected to make unprecedented demands on computer
processing power.
That's where Levine's Butterfly.net enters the picture. The West Virginia
company employs 13 programmers who have created software linking powerful
computers that are connected by the Internet. Harnessing their combined
processing power distributes the workload more efficiently and at a lower
cost. Meanwhile, the partnership with IBM allows Butterfly.net to act as an
outsourcer for other game publishers. Because Butterfly can easily adjust the
number of individual computers on the grid, a company can quickly add or
subtract processing power to match demand.
Levine does not have to search far for possible uses for a gaming grid.
"Electronic Arts spent a lot of money building the infrastructure for one
of their online games, "Majestic," because they expected a million users; ten
thousand showed up," he said. "A year later they launched the beta for another
game, "Earth and Beyond," expecting a couple of thousand users; hundreds of
thousands of people showed up."
Levine's point: "If they were using a grid, they could have used some of
the infrastructure from their failed game for their new games."
What all this may mean for mainstream businesses is that once they hook
into a grid, they'll only pay for the amount of computer processing needed: no
more, no less. Every business that needs computer power will not have to find
the funds to build out a large farm of servers to obtain it. And there won't
be just one grid, according to Levine. There will be an overlapping patchwork
of regional and vertical industry grids, serving, say, bioinformatic projects,
or 3-D animators, or weather forecasters.
This is not just Levine's fantasy. Major players like IBM are pushing the
computing grid concept to enable a future where computing power becomes a
utility, just like electricity.
If the idea spreads, some technology-oriented business plans are going to
get a lot leaner when they get to the computer processing part: "Dish it off
to a grid" may become a viable, low-cost option.
D.C. Denison can be reached at:
denison@globe.com.
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