IBM deploy Butterfly Grid for video game industry

IBM have announced the deployment of the first-ever custom commercial grid for the online video gaming market.

According to IBM, the Butterfly Grid design offers the potential to support over one million simultaneous players from each facility with 99.999% uptime.

Peter Kelly, IBM Regional Business Manager Northern Ireland, said: "Grid computing is a model for building and deploying extremely reliable, high-performance applications on the Internet. In the grid model, applications draw data, computing and communications resources on-demand from any available server system connected to the Internet. These systems are joined together by a set of standard protocols maintained by the Globus open source community."

The Butterfly Grid enables online video game providers to support a massive number of players within the same game by allocating computing resources to the most populated areas and most popular games.

Butterfly.net, a development studio and infrastructure provider to the online video game market, demonstrated the Butterfly Grid system to members of the video gaming industry at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2002 in Los Angeles.

The Grid was built by Butterfly.net over the last two years using IBM e-business infrastructure technology that distributes the processing of video game interaction across a network of server farms, enabling Butterfly.net to support a massive number of video gamers playing simultaneously over the Internet. The Grid is a secure system built on customised software operating on the private network of Butterfly.net.

Mr Kelly added: "e-business on demand can be defined as a way for customers to acquire infrastructure, applications and business processes over the network, in an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model. This new model is based on remotely delivering standardised applications, infrastructure, and processes over the network, in a shared environment. This is exactly what the Butterfly Grid does – joined by a set of standard protocols, applications can draw data, computing and communications resources on-demand from any available server system connected to the Internet."

Video game providers can access the Grid to support their online products by including the Butterfly Grid client software libraries in the games they distribute.

The Butterfly Grid is powered by rack-mounted Linux-based IBM eServer xSeries systems hosted by IBM and running on internal fiber-optic networks for optimal use of computing and communications resources.

(SP)