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An Evening with Jim Waldo
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
Collossal 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.
During the past two years, I have
lead a project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories trying to build a
highly-scalable, highly-concurrent infrastructure for massive-scale
on-line games and virtual worlds. This work has brought us into
contact with the culture of games and the inhabitants of that
culture. 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.
6:00-6:10pm Open NYJavaSIG Q&A and
Administrivia
6:10-8:00pm Jim Waldo and Project Darkstar
8:00-8:10pm Raffle
IntelliJ 7.0 courtesy of JetBrains
See you at the meeting. Remember... 3 no-shows and you're out.
:)
Eat, Drink, Code.
Frank G. - NYJavaSIG Chair
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