HPCwire: UCSD, IBM Launch Digital Media Center

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March 17, 2009

UCSD, IBM Launch Digital Media Center

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IBM Shared University Research Award of a System z10 Mainframe computer will support new UCSD Campus Center

SAN DIEGO, Calif., and ARMONK, NY, March 17 -- Researchers at the University of California, San Diego today announced plans for a new campus center dedicated to invent the next generation of virtual worlds, multiple player online games, and high fidelity digital cinema, using one of the world's most sophisticated computer servers -- the IBM System z mainframe.

IBM provided a Shared University Research (SUR) award to help the university jump-start its new Center for Next-Generation Digital Media on the UC San Diego campus. In addition to multiple peripherals and additional support, the IBM award consists of the company's newest System z10 Enterprise Class server with the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.).

"Students will have access to IBM's newest hybrid computing system with blazingly fast and powerful capabilities. UCSD students can now tap into security features and 'specialty engines' designed to handle a new generation of virtual world applications, where massive numbers of simultaneous users can share a single environment," said Bernie Meyerson, IBM fellow and vice president of Systems and Technology Group.

"We want to facilitate the invention of the next generation of digital media," said Sheldon Brown, a visual arts professor at UC San Diego. "By significantly increasing the experiential richness of virtual worlds, we think they will become a proving ground for creating and interconnecting digital media of all forms, starting with games and cinema. As virtual worlds and digital cinema develop more visual sophistication and cultural literacy about how we use them, they will start to intersect and will become much richer and more complex."

Initially, Brown and his team in UCSD's Experimental Game Lab will use the IBM System z server to develop and operate a virtual world based on Brown's museum installation "Scalable City," extending it to be experienced by potentially thousands of simultaneous users worldwide 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Users could potentially experience a more visually and behaviorally complex virtual world than current efforts as seen in Second Life, The Sims or other massively multiplayer online role-playing games, such as World of Warcraft.

To date, a lack of computing power has limited what users can see in virtual worlds, which may have thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of objects. When users have moved to different parts of the virtual world, they moved to different computer server nodes in the computing cluster, which resulted in making the experience of the total world very fragmented.

According to Brown, IBM System z mainframes offer just what the virtual worlds of tomorrow will need. The system's high volume processing capabilities combined with the dense computing power of IBM's Cell/Broadband Engine multiprocessor technology puts real-time interaction in a virtual world within reach for users.

"The IBM mainframe can look like a couple hundred computers in a cluster, or look like one giant computer. We can optimize tradeoffs between storage and processing, which we can use to change the shape and nature of the virtual world experience," Brown explained.

While IBM mainframes can enhance the real-time nature and verisimilitude of virtual worlds, the experience of users will always be limited, in part, by the "client" side -- the personal computers with which users enter those virtual worlds. To that end, the UC San Diego researchers are already experimenting with multi-core processors for client-side computing, including the Intel chip code-named Larrabee, which won't be commercially available until early 2010, along with the IBM Cell processor. With partners at three other universities, Brown has also won a planning grant from the National Science Foundation for an industry-university collaborative research center on hybrid multi-core computing.

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