A distributed supercomputer games network now in development could for the first time enable more than a million people to play graphics-rich games together via the internet.
When the “Butterfly Grid” is up and running, its creators say that online games will run faster, be more reliable and may never need to shut down for maintenance.
IBM has contributed the hardware for the network and helped US company Butterfly with the development. IBM’s Scott Penberthy says: “Instead of having multiple custom infrastructures for different games, you can take resources as you need them. Butterfly’s vision is that they can apportion through the grid different servers for different games. Then as the demand for one game grows they can add servers.”
Butterfly currently has 50 IBM servers as part of its network. Penberthy says this would allow roughly 5000 simultaneous users but as many servers as required can be added: “Essentially, it’s unlimited computing power.”
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The project borrows techniques developed to seamlessly connect scientific computers for research. Scientific supercomputer “grids” are built from protocols that allow different computers to share power and storage via the internet.
Super-gaming
Online games currently rely on dedicated servers. These may struggle to allocate memory and bandwidth to all players trying to connect at any one time, resulting in game play lag. Sometimes this means the same game is split onto a number of different servers.
But with the Butterfly Grid, the network will automatically allocate more memory and bandwidth from many different banks of servers to whichever game requires it most.
The system’s developers say this would allow millions of users to connect simultaneously, rather than just hundreds of thousands as is currently possible. It would also make it possible to add new hardware without stopping a game.
As well as games designed specifically for the internet, an increasing number of console and PC games can be played online. The popularity of internet gaming is growing rapidly, says Jason Rutter, computer games researcher at the University of Manchester: “You almost can’t release a game now without it having an internet add-on.”
Butterfly has developed the software that will allow any game to plug into any the network. Computer games programmers need only include the relevant code in their game to make use of the Butterfly grid. Butterfly will take a cut of the revenue earned from online gaming for providing the service. Its code is designed to work on many different platforms, including handheld computers.
Rutter says enabling players on different platforms to play together would be a huge boost: “This seems to be the nirvana everyone is working towards.”
