It’s just a jump to the left
And then a step to the right
With your hands on your hips
You bring your knees in tight
But it’s the pelvic thrust
That really drives you insane
Let’s do the Time Warp again
Engadget has announced a Folding@Home program where “you can donate your processor’s spare cycles to study of protein folding; possible uses for the data including curing many forms of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and all sorts of other diseases”.
Stanford’s Folding@Home says, in their FAQ:
Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University’s Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.
Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication.
Okay, but what about GAMES? My pal Roger Ryder read my Cities As Game Grids article and told me I should look into the massive Multiplayer Game Second Life. It uses the Open GL standard so it works on Macs and PCs. Thousands of people can create and move around the shared environment. They can also exchange real money, (the operater gets a percentage). A free download is available.
A virtual space resort is being built in the online role-playing game, Project Entropia which lets thousands of players interact with each other. It was snapped up for $100,000. Entropia has 236,000 registered accounts. In the game, players exchange real currency with PEDs (Project Entropia Dollars).
Massively Parallel Online Role-playing Games (WikiPedia) enables thousands of players to play in an evolving virtual world at the same time.
So yesterday I dropped into our local governmental agency, Metro, to pursue the idea. Metro gathers all sorts of public domain GIS data, including high resolution aerial photographs and digital elevation maps, and create products like Portland Maps. You can choose all sorts of thematic maps such as Elevation Maps and Photo Maps.
I was looking for a CD of DEMs and imagery. I was curious if you could combine, say, localized 3D (LiDar) elevation data sets with high resolution photos. Software packages like Vexcel do this routinely. You can create “walk throughs” like those used by architects with software like this.
But nobody’s done city-wide “walk-throughs” because it requires expensive computer resources. But there could be a demand for localized content — linked to your 3D location. Clickable oral history. Shit like that.
But maybe some massively parallel, grid technogy, such as Grid Toolkit 4.0, could make the concept practical.
Look at The Globus Toolkit (docs & IBM overview). It is open source software used to by computing grids and is being developed by the Globus Alliance and other organizations world-wide.
There are dozens of Grid projects. They include private, public, regional and global networks. The Global Grid Forum and CERN’s GridCafe explain the principle while Globus World investigates how the grid will change applications.
NEPTUNE is a planned Regional Cabled Observatory for the West Coast. The Canadian (VENUS) and US (MARS) observatory testbeds are being built now.
The Neptune Project will monitor the seabed off the West Coast for earthquakes and tsunamis.
The OptIPuter will utilize switchable fiber and ultra large, high resolution data sets. The Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge INtegration Grid (LOOKING) will link, via experimental wireless, optical networks, and Grid technology, a series of facilities located off the Pacific coasts of Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
Maybe grid research could be combined with work by the Open Source Development Lab on mobile platforms.
Soon, X-Box 360s and Playstation 3s will deliver an order of magnitude more performance. For everyone.
Anime is a growing share of Japanese box office revenues and increasingly popular world-wide. It’s a collaborative strategy.
| Grids: Why Bother?Earth scientists keep track of the level of atmospheric ozone with satellite observations. They download, from space to ground, about 100 Gigabytes of raw images per day (the equivalent of about 150 CDs).
High Energy Physics will soon produce about 10 Petabytes of data per year (about 20 million CDs). This data will record the result of collisions of extremely energetic fundamental particles. Thousands of physicists in dozens of universities around the world will want to analyse this data! Unlocking the secrets of the human genome would be impossible without the computerized analysis of massive amounts of data, including the sequence of the three billion chemical units that comprise our DNA. Monitoring the Juan de Fuca Fault might require manipulation of 1000×1000x1000 pixels (voxels), or one gigapixel, requiring supercomputer speeds and the sharing of massive data bases. Massively multiplayer gaming, like Halo 2 or Everquest, and services like X-Box Live need to interconnect thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of users. Today’s clustering solutions would benefit from the decentralization and sharing of grid architecture. Monthly revenue from tens of millions of on-line gamers is a motivation. |
Halo 2 generated over $125 million dollars in the first 24 hours when it went on sale last November. It has sold more than 6.7 million copies to date. Microsoft’s Bungie studio develops the game from a nondescript business office complex near Redmond.
Maybe Portland schools could help plot volcano activity with infrasound. Maybe Open source software and screensaver techniques like Folding@Home will lower costs.
I don’t know. I’m clueless. But curious. One thing’s for sure; by this time next month, there will be more 3D power in homes than could even be conceived just a few years ago.
Apple’s Xgrid and Butterfly.net provides grid-based infrastructure for hosting multi-player online games. IBM manages and hosts Butterfly.net’s (LAMP) software on xSeries e-servers, based on Intel processors.
Hundreds of thousands, even tens of millions of game platforms like the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 are going on-line. They’ll generate $10/month - without multi-million star salaries, residuals or $100 million production budgets. Singapore is where you should be. China is expected to have 57 million broadband subscribers, compared to 54 million in the United States by 2007.
The world is flat. Blow this pop stand.
Related DailyWireless stories include; U.S. a broadband laggard, Big Science Projects, Taipei Unwired, The Global Hub, Gollum Blows Hollywood, Transnational Media Production, Outsourcing US, Sony’s Cell Comes Alive, Grid Becomes Self-Aware, Creating an International Zone, West Coast Grid.
