WPI Computer Science - Colloquium Announcement

A Preliminary Report on the Project Darkstar Anthropological Expedition into the World of Massively Scaled On-Line Games and Virtual World

Jim Waldo

Sun Microsystems Labs

[The Slides for the Talk]

Friday, September 26, 2008
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

Abstract:

While the culture of enterprise computing, transaction processing, and web services has developed, an entirely different culture centering on computing has evolved in an entirely different ecosystem. While those in our culture tend to play the artifacts produced by their culture, and those in their culture tend to use the programming languages produced in our culture, in fact the two groups lost contact somewhere in the Colossal Cave, and have had little real interaction since.

These cultures are about to be brought together again. The architectural move to multi-core, multi-threaded chips will require changes in the way games are programmed, while the requirements of scaling in games such as World of Warcraft require the use of distributed systems. As virtual worlds begin to emerge, the distinction between business or scientific systems and games will begin to disappear.

In this talk, I will describe some of the ways in which the game world differs from the computing world most of us are used to, and talk about the particular challenges that are facing that world that might profitably be approached in a cross-cultural fashion.

If nothing else, the work that we have done in trying to make games scale to large numbers of threads and large numbers of processors offers an interesting contrast to the approaches that have been taken by others, such as those in scientific computing or large-scale search. The contrast may help us to understand that one size does not fit all when it comes to these problems, and may show alternate avenues of research into making use of the computing infrastructures that are being built.

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Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, where he is the principle investigator of the Neuromancer project. Prior to (re)joining Sun Labs, Jim was the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java. While at Sun, Jim has done research and product development in the areas of object-oriented programming and Jim is an adjunct faculty member of Harvard University, where he teaches distributed computing in the department of computer science.

http://research.sun.com/people/mybio.php?c=444

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Last modified: September 22,2008