Scaling up to support the hundreds of thousands, even millions of users playing massive online games is an ongoing industry problem. The goal with Sun's Project Darkstar is to provide an infrastructure that lets people write massive multiplayer online games that can scale dynamically, while not being required to change their programming model.
Jim Waldo, distinguished engineer, principal investigator at Sun Labs and chief architect of Project Darkstar, joins Innovating@Sun host Hal Stern for a podcast that highlights how Project Darkstar addresses the issues with massive multi-player online games. Listen in to hear about:
How Sun is working to hide multi-threading and distribution to scale games up behind a simple, single-threaded programming model
Work being done to expand and contract the number of machines being used for a particular game without having to reprogram the game
Major innovations including a system tailored to event-based programming
Why Java shows a performance advantage due to dynamic compilation and short run tasks
How to get your hands on the Project Darkstar open source binaries and server source code
Efforts to encourage partners to integrate modules for things like billing as well as efforts to make the project grid-enabled
If you're interested in network game development, check out the latest edition of Innovating@Sun and go to Project Darkstar to pick up documentation, tutorials, or the binary. Check out sample programs and Javadoc. Don't worry about what platform you're running, it's all in Java. Get involved in forums and start playing today!
Links:
Transcript
Project Darkstar Website
Project Darkstar Overview
Darkstar CTO Interview
Project Darkstar: Changing the Game
There's no question the world needs computing to get to where it wants to go. It's hard to think of a sustainable world not having more optimized computing than it does today. But the way we build computers, storage, networking, and datacenters today is not sustainable, thus creating opportunities for innovators to gain competitive advantage in the area of energy efficiency.
Sun's Vice President of Eco Responsibility, Dave Douglas, joins Hal Stern for this latest edition of Innovating@Sun to discuss the lowdown behind the industry's latest buzzword “eco-responsibility”.
Core to the discussion is energy and what options exist for enterprises that are running out of space, power, and cooling in their datacenters. In particular, the pair discuss:
Why each dollar you spend on equipment will cause you to spend more money on energy over time
How sustainable computing relates to eco responsibility
The importance of a long-term view for IT purchases and decisions
Outsourcing
The impact of increasing datacenter density and the coming expertise in design methodologies
Why tape storage is a wild card for energy efficiency
Big business opportunities await providers with the vision and expertise to innovate in the area of energy efficiency. Check out Innovating@Sun for the scoop.
Links:
Transcript
Dave Douglas's Blog
Press Release
Eco Innovation Website
Eco Responsible Datacenter
The swelling network tide of customers, devices, and business around the globe is putting increasing pressure on vendors to deliver servers with more performance, more network bandwidth, more pervasive security, and more threads. For server vendors, the challenge is meeting all of these requirements within increasingly constrained space and power envelopes. The UltraSPARC T2 processor (code-named Niagara 2) was designed to build on the success of its predecessor, the UltraSPARC T1, and to address these challenges head-on. By scaling performance through threading, and integrating networking, security, and I/O onto the processor itself, the UltraSPARC T2 delivers more throughput, performance, and functionality per watt than any processor in its class.
Innovating@Sun host Hal Stern met with Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Sun Microelectronics, Rick Hetherington to discuss this latest silicon innovation from Sun. Topics covered include:
Design choices that make UltraSPARC T2 a true server on a chip
New features from the Niagara 1 baseline including a different floating point architecture, memory controller and crypto-interface
How we've more than doubled bandwidth and vastly increased capacity
How UltraSPARC T2 is “future-proofed”, covering 99.9% of all the encryption and security needs for the market
The programming interface
Virtualization and OS support
Plans for open sourcing
Links:
Transcript
UltraSPARC Processor website
Kernel.org
OpenSPARC.net
