[Ainulindale-devel] A couple of perspectives... medium sized mail

[Andrea Negro]

We already discussed about the overview a few days ago, while having a pizza.
But just to remind the key points about the project.

The scope of the project is as beautiful and difficult as before, but we're 
trying to pushing it to a slightly more complicated state. :)
The basic idea is to switch from a isolated, written-from-scratch framework to 
a brand-new existing one, which has a larger scope: in shorts, to switch from 
a mmorpg framework to a Gaming Grid framework.

Brief summary about the Grid technology.
The concept is quite old: to gather small resources, virtualize 
individualities, and provide users a large, virtual, more-powerful-than-ever 
computer. You could think to distributed computing, but you must think about 
this familiar concept as a sub-set of a Grid concept.

- Example 1: Seti at home. It is the classic example of a Computational Grid. 
Quite simple: parallelize a big job into independent subprocesses, and run 
each of them on a desktop, then recollect and unify results.

- Example 2: EU Datagrid. If you like physics like me, you probably know that 
they're creating a new technology for CERN. Instead of the old LEP, they're 
building the LHC, Large Electron Positron. It will be ready by 2005 or later. 
Each of the 4 labs around the LHC ring will provide data about particle 
collisions. The rate of output data will be around 10Tb a day: many, may Pb 
per year, something which is impossible to handle today.
The idea to solve this problem is a Data Grid: provided a large enough storage 
or virtualized pool of storages, the problem is to provide access to the data 
to all the scientists around the world.
So the solution is to create a VO (virtual organization, as it is called in 
Grid): if you enter (have the credentials) to enter the VO, you will be able 
to search data, retrieve them and submit results as if all that stuff was on 
a lan server, or even on the local machine.
Obviously, this is quite complicated: the Grid middleware layer must take care 
of where data is, index it, provide enough resiliency, handle replicas in 
order to minimize internet usage, provide a standard way to submit a single 
query and eventually gather data from various sources (thus hiding the data 
location complexity to the user).

- Example 3: AccessGrid. This is a different kind of grid. In particular, this 
is an open project to provide massive collaboration tools, or a video 
conferencing system. This is basically a standard video conferencing tool, 
but globus-based: it uses the security infrastructure, indexing system and a 
bunch of other stuff, not important now. What is important to understand is 
that Grid is not just computation and data.

- Example 4: Butterfly Grid. This is an IBM project. Basically is a host for 
online gaming, and will be used by Sony. It is not a particular game, it is 
an infrascturture to run games. The system is a linux cluster, and all 
applications are developed with globus, so the cluster is quite 
self-managing, and is able to respond automatically to peak of utilizations 
and to plug-and-play nodes to provide more power, or detach them for better 
utilization of resources.

- Example 5: Ain. :)
We already have the Butterfly! Why do we need something different? That's a 
question. The answer is: Butterfly is not really a Grid. Gartner Group 
defines Grid as a 'collection of resources across boundaries of 
organizations', that's why Butterfly is just a Grid-like system: its 
architecture is all self-contained in the Butterfly site. We want Ain to be a 
*real* grid, thus collecting and managing resources across the internet to 
provide the gaming host. This is quite difficult, of course. :)

- Briiiiiiiiiiiief, really briiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiief roadmap...
My idea is to get the Grid Middleware (Globus Toolkit 3 project), adding on 
top a layer of services targeted to Gaming Grid, and having this middleware 
installed on all the computers partecipating to the grid will enable resource 
sharing and management to the Grid itself. Then, people could join VOs, each 
of them being probably a different gaming environment (I mean, a real game), 
and play online.

Think about it and do as many questions as you can. I will provide later 
presentations about the existing framework for Grid, which is itself rather 
complicated. At a glance, technologies involved are Web Services, XML, SOAP, 
security stuff, Grid Services, AI, Network.

- References:
Globus Project: www.globus.org, see GT3 (alpha).
AccessGrid: www.accessgrid.net
EU Datagrid: http://eu-datagrid.web.cern.ch/eu-datagrid/default.htm
Butterfly Grid: www.butterfly.net

-- 
Andrea Negro

address@hidden
ICQ 25458773