Gameframe
| Company type | Technology platform |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer hardware, Online gaming |
| Founded | 2007 |
| Founder | Hoplon, IBM |
| Headquarters | United States |
| Products | Hybrid computer architecture integrating IBM System z mainframe and Cell/B.E. blades |
A Gameframe represents a hybrid computer architecture originally designed for the online video game industry. It integrates elements from both supercomputer and mainframe technologies, delivering a combination of substantial processing power and high data throughput.
History
The gameframe initiative began in 2007 when Hoplon partnered with IBM to develop a system utilizing an IBM System z mainframe alongside Cell/B.E. blades—eight-core processors famously used in Sony's PlayStation 3—to support their online title Taikodom. This project advanced further through a collaboration between IBM and the University of California, San Diego in 2009.
The System z platform provides strong security features and can manage extensive workloads, ensuring dependable execution of administrative operations while maintaining stable connections to a large number of clients. The Cell/B.E. blades are responsible for the most computationally demanding tasks, freeing the System z to concentrate on essential system functions.
By shifting intensive calculations from the expensive System z CPUs to more cost-efficient Cell blades, this design delivers an effective and economical game server solution, enhancing financial feasibility.
The gameframe consistently handles transactional data—such as monitoring players’ spaceships, armaments, and virtual currency—and runs simulations involving trajectories and collision detection. It supports thousands of concurrent users, with performance scaling positively as the user base expands.
In contrast to titles like World of Warcraft, which rely on multiple separate clusters to accommodate large populations, the gameframe offers a single cohesive environment without duplicating game worlds.
Running on the Cell-augmented mainframe is Hoplon's virtual-world middleware, bitVerse, which utilizes IBM's WebSphere XD along with DB2 database software.
This platform has also contributed to the development of the IBM Virtual Universe Community.
External links
- "To Probe Further: The Gameframe Guild" Aug 2008 at ieee.org
- "Mainframes on the Cutting Edge of Technology: Hoplon Infotainment’s Gameframe" Sept 11, 2008 at mainframezone.com
- "Sun and I.B.M. to Offer New Class of High-End Servers" Apr 26, 2007 at nytimes.com
Videos
- Hoplon Infotainment, Brazil startup and maker of Taikodom online video game 27 Apr 2009 at YouTube
- Brazil Trip -- Hoplon Infotainment 20 Sept 2007 at YouTube
- Mainframes in Brazil 20 Sept 2007 at YouTube