Los Angeles, CA — (press release excerpt) — Today, IBM and video game developer Butterfly.net announced a breakthrough in providing video games over the Internet, introducing the first-ever computing grid to support the online video gaming market. Dubbed the “Butterfly Grid,” the one-of-its-kind computing system will for the first time enable video game providers to offer gamers the same experience over… the Internet as they get from their XBox, PlayStation, or GameCube.

The grid design, which runs on Linux, is so revolutionary, so resilient, it can support over one million simultaneous players from each facility with no limit to the number of players who can be on the Grid at one time.

Two years in development, the Butterfly Grid was created in response to the video game industry's most pressing issue. For video games to move onto the Internet and truly reach mass-market proportions, they must be as simple to use and perform as reliably as television, radio and the telephone. Today, online games are far from reliable (they are often taken off-line for hours at a time for server maintenance), and they are very complex to create, to manage and to play. They are also very expensive to operate, because the video game publisher must invest in new systems for each game that is launched. The Butterfly Grid changes all of this. Video game publishers that utilize the Butterfly Grid to support their games can allocate server resources via the Grid to popular games, maintain servers without interrupting game-play and develop very advanced games using simple, open-source scripting language.

Butterfly will make the Grid accessible to video game providers like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft for testing of games beginning immediately.

The timing is strategic — this fall, Internet connection services for the newest generation of video-game consoles, Sony's PlayStation2 and Microsoft's Xbox, will be introduced bringing scores of popular games such as Spiderman and Star Wars to the mass-market — online. Millions of these Internet-ready video game consoles are in homes today — a market potentially worth billions.

For IBM, the announcement represents a validation of its investment in Grid computing, the emerging model for building and deploying extremely reliable, high-performance applications on the Internet. For Butterfly, the innovative partnership with IBM and the bold decision to build the Grid holds the promise of making it a major player in the fast-growing video game industry.

Online video games have historically segmented players onto separate servers, limiting the number that could interact and creating reliability and support obstacles. In the first generation of games, when one server is down, or patches are being installed, game-play comes to a halt. Butterfly's second-generation grid technology enables online video game providers to reliably deliver fast-paced, cutting edge games to millions at the same time. The server interaction is completely transparent and seamless to the user — delivering a resilient gaming infrastructure where servers can be added, or replaced, without interrupting game-play.

The new Butterfly Grid is the industry's first to provide support for:

• Massive numbers of players within one persistent-state world. — Before the Butterfly Grid, online video games have been divided into “shards” that provide copies of the game world on separate servers, limiting the number of players that can interact. The Butterfly Grid provides “cross-server sentinels” that could potentially support the interaction of millions of players in one true world, with server boundaries invisible to players.
  
• Distributed Artificial Intelligence — Butterfly.net provides a “daemon controller” for advanced interactions between players and non-player characters through a simple, standard Python interface.
  
• Game genre's — Developers can build innovative action, strategy, role-playing, simulation and adventure games, combine genres and invent new ones.
  
• Multiple, concurrent games — With multiple online video games on one computing grid, publishers can allocate resources to more popular games, launch new games with less risk, and offer flexible and innovative subscription plans to drive revenue growth.
  
• Connected devices — Butterfly.net connects PCs, PocketPCs, Palm-compatible handhelds, and dedicated video-game consoles in massively-multiplayer online games. An innovative packet-transport protocol provides fast, balanced game-play over broadband, dial-up and mobile Internet connections for unique multi-channel interactions
  
• Hot-swappable components. — Once an online video game is launched, it doesn't need to be constantly taken off line for patches or maintenance. When grid components are unavailable, connections are redirected to available resources for continuous gameplay.
  
• 3D engine support — Game developers working on the Butterfly Grid can exploit fully integrated, industry-standard 3D engines out of the box.
  
• Shared-source developer sandbox.- Unique license program allows for real-time prototyping on live server grid with full bandwidth and simulation/load testing.

An emerging model of computing, Grids are built with clusters of servers joined together over the Internet, using protocols provided by the Globus open source community and other open technologies, including Linux. Like the World Wide Web enables people to share content over standard, open protocols, Grid protocols emerging from the Globus open source community are enabling organizations to create virtual organizations sharing applications, data and computing power over the Internet to collaborate, tackle large problems and lower the cost of computing

Butterfly.net is working with Globus to ensure that any video game developed according to publicly-available specifications and Internet open standards can draw resources-on-demand from the Butterfly Grid. The Globus Toolkit, available by download from www.globus.org, provides authorization and accounting functions, allocates hardware resources, configures game-specific logic and monitors performance on the Butterfly Grid.

IBM is the industry's leading supplier of Grid systems and services to the scientific and technical community and is working with the Globus open source community and others to extend Grid computing into commercial environments. In addition to working with many of the world's leading labs and research organizations in the development of Grid projects, IBM Research used Globus technologies to build its own Grid — a geographically distributed supercomputer linking IBM research and development labs in the United States, Israel, Switzerland, Japan and England. IBM's Global Services organization offers the complete range of IT skills needed to build, run and maintain Grids.

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