IBM Tests Grid With Games

Fun with an enterprise purpose: Big Blue is using the Quake 2 first-person shooter as a torture test of its grid-computing system

IBM Corp. has begun a real-world test of its grid-computing system by turning to a familiar geek pastime: games.

GameGrid fits somewhere between a research project and a development program. "Although we're not commenting on our product plans, we are talking to game developers and encouraging them to work with us," said Sandra Myers, a member of the Global Emerging Development portion of IBM's grid-systems team.

In a typical first-person shooter, players connect to a single server that can accommodate up to about 32 players at one time. IBM's GameGrid technology acts more like the technology used by massively-multiplayer online games, which shares the game world across several servers or groups of servers. GameGrid could be used both with a traditional networked first-person shooter as well as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG, said James Kaufman, a computer-science research staff manager at IBM's Almaden facility in San Jose, Calif