In this episode, James and Coté talk with Tarquinio Teles, CEO of Hoplon, about their decision to run their MMP game on System z mainframes with Linux.
The details of how Hoplon are using IBM’s On Demand mainframes as a grid are interesting and slightly different than the mainframe story we’re used to hearing. In fact, it seems quite similar to the coolness of Amazon’s recent E2 launch.
So, check it out.
IBM has some additional material up on Hoplon as well.
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Technorati Tags: brazil, games, grids, hoplon, hosted, ibm, mainframes, ondemand, saas, systemz
What they're saying that the Z Series service can do is pretty damned impressive, but I have to wonder if it'll really scale as well as they project.
I'm playing EVEOnline right now which, from the description that Mr. Teles gave, sounds *exactly* like TaikoDom in terms of gameplay. The thing is CCP, the company that runs the game, has been having pretty serious scaling issues recently despite the length of time they've been running the game (about 3 years). The problem seems to center around too many concurrent users on one of the nodes in the cluster (supposedly more than 50 players engaging in combat at once brings a node to its knees) and I have to wonder if even with the power of the mainframe can Hoplon handle the number of concurrent interacting users especially with physics simulations (EVE relies on more statistical combat). Or perhaps their gameplay is engineered in such a way as to prevent battles of that size?
Oh yeah, it's worth noting that EVEOnline doesn't split the users amongst different instances of the Universe: all players are in the same game world (Well, actually that's not entirely true, they did recently start a Chinese version of the game, but I hear there's some talk of merging them too.)
Check out the eigthbar blog – the Metaverse evangelists at IBM have run a couple of exciting projects in SecondLive.
my biggest question is scale, danno. you're absolutely right to bring it up. until the game is in production with a ton of concurrent users we really don't know just how well the box will cope. that said – the mainframe is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world when it comes to stateful I/O. the physics simulations raises questions too. the frame is of course better at I/O than full on maths.