As many of you will have already seen over on 3pointd here and here IBM is working with Hoplon on using high end mainframe machines powered by cell processors.
I am sure there may be a little bit of confusion when people hear Cell, and make the association to the cell powered Sony PS3, and also to what is going on in other virtual worlds like Second Life.
Now Eightbar is not an IBM press release vehicle, it is still us lot in Hursley talking about things going on in our lives, but this is an interesting extra aspect to the entire business of the Metaverse. It is also interesting as Hursley is the home of CICS which is the transaction system that runs on 90% of IBM’s mainframes.
IBM produces high end mainframe machines. Super computers and machines that run the banking systems that we all use daily. The web has encoraged the use of the smaller cheaper machine, but scales by adding lots of cheaper machines and allowing for failure of individual units in server farms.
The choice of “big iron” is made around robustness and constant scalabaility. The very powerful cell processor is not solely in home consoles, but is being applied to other major applications that need lots of power and speed and reliability. One of these is the virtual world server code for Hoplon.
You might also like to not a bit of historical information from back in 2005 with IBM blade servers being used host Eve-Online
So it is a nice evolutionary step in using computing power, and very exciting in the mainframe business.
The virtual world industry is certainly hotting up, having the mainframe business, which is core to IBM gives even more credibility to whats happening.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 by Ian Hughes/epredator at 13:54 and is filed under Hursley, Second Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can also bookmark this page on del.icio.us or digg.