[SATLUG] Next month's presentation

[firestorm_v1]

if it's got a railgun akin to Q3A I'll be a betatester of the Linux 
client.. ;-)


FIRESTORM_v1

Steven Winston wrote:

>I agree, this would be a very interesting presentation.  Personally my company 
>(Global Gaming Innovations) is working with wide area clustering.  My 
>interest would be peaked and I *might* actually make it to my first SATLUG 
>meeting.  That's true that creating a cluster is easy, although to be honest, 
>you DONT need MPI or PVM to do it.  The tools are already present in TCP/IP 
>protocol programing.  Building a cluster doesn't have to require installing 
>or configuring anything!!!  
>However, if you wanna get into fun things like multi-threaded parrallel 
>computing, you're gonna want to use the kitchen sink of distributed parallel 
>computing (MPI).  There's one major draw back in today's tech that is on the 
>market.  That is, try starting up your program and pull the plug on ANY of 
>the nodes in the LAM, whops all gone, with no signal.  There's ways to send 
>heartbeats and Duke University is developing methods of gracefully shutting 
>down your distributed program with error codes.  However, this is currently a 
>major pain in the arse.  Also for more about wide area distributed processing 
>check out the Albatras (sp?) project.  It's looking pretty good (4 
>universities making up shared clusters).
>
>Oh and if there is interest, my company is about to release its first beta 
>test (will work natively in linux) of a FPS game that will use the 
>distributed processing tech to create massive multiplayer online games. (read 
>as 500-1000 or more quakster types fragging each other on one server). I'll 
>post an anouncement incase anyone is interested in seeing this type of stuff 
>work.
>