Saturday, June 16, 2007

Friday's Geekmeet: IBM-Intel-Sun

Friday's the night of the weekly Geek Meet at the home of Metaversed's 57. This weeks turned out to be übergeekmeet.

This first pic show me and Aleister sitting next to epradator, aside from us, and 57 we saw several other bloggers and journalists appear at the meeting, all curious to see what the übergeeks of IBM, Intel and Sun would have to say.
Here's a full wrap up of the crowd, filled with the Geeks, the guru's and the metapolitans.

Epradator, one of Second Life's big chieftains, heading the IBM tribe which has grown to about 6.000! members, blogger at the famous eightbar blog was to kick off the meeting giving us some inside information on wtf IBM is doing inside SL. Well, that's easy. Ian (epradator) works for the IBM CIO office, and is responsible for moving 330K people into a virtual workspace;

"the subject is using the metaverse for business and what are we up to that is not Second Life. Firstly I have to say that SL has been the catalyst for all this, many of us have tried to get things like this going for years so we are not in any way not supporting SL, but.... there is a need for corporates to be able to have secure intranets and on those intranets there is a willigness to have a metaverse now. Still some resistence of course but most of the time I get asked 'right can we have a secure meeting?' whereas it used to be 'what the heck are you up to playing games at work'. So we have moved from a skunkwork project with Algernon Spackler and I to a digital convergece emerging business unit"

IBM's ideal situation would be to create some unified communication standard between various metaverses;

"The trick then is to deal with the flow between all these virtual worlds, the underlying standards. So I think its fair to say we are less interested in building another SL, more interested in having more than one platform to then get talking to one another, dealing with property flow between the environments helping with open standards"

The second speaker was Parviz Peiravi (a.k.a. Core Stine), Intel's evangelist but SL newbie, and thus running only a short story on virtualisation;

"I think if we run SL on virtual infrastructures utilizing both virtualization and grid we will be able to handle much more audience."

Third speaker was Klaatu Niu, a Sr. Systems Engineer from Sun, who mainly tried to propagate Sun's networked.com to a crowd of SL addicts, so that was a little queer.

"What we at Sun have done is make avail to the public a large scale computational grid for anyone to run jobs on... Today.. its a batch oriented environement. but you pay only $1 US per CPU hour consumed we also allow you to publish for others to run .. and use your own applications there.. what I think . might be interesting. and something that I'm begging to investigate is ..can an SL object.. submit to our grid some processing needs and get the results back."

To the metapolitans present it wasn't a quick win, someone was quick to point out that Amazon's EC2 cloud only runs at $ 0.05 /hr and that large scale projects, such as Jerry Paffendorf's innovative Destroy Television experiment, streaming 99,000 pictures from SL to Flickr turned out to be quite expensive.

Most interesting point is that Sun tried hard to steer away from rumours over the alledged virtual world project codenamed MPK20.

I think it is pretty safe to say that Intel and Sun are still seeking a way into web 3D but still remain deeply rooted in the era of the Digerati, whereas IBM surely has moved on to the Metarati age.

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4 Comments:

Blogger Aleister Kronos said...

VeeJay

I knew some kind sould would blog what was said! Good man!!

Re the guy from Sun, I think he shied away from MPK20 because he simply did not know about it. I was going to ask Epredator about Innov8, IBM's VW for SOA (lots of initials there to chew over) but the chat had moved on, so I asked him via IM. He's not seen it yet, as it's clearly a US initiative (have they seen the VW stuff he's trialling?).

It's the nature of global corps, I'm afraid (and I should know!) that information, even regarding stuff you are working on, may not reach you from other business units.

Sunday, June 17, 2007 12:00:00 AM  
Anonymous Nicole Yankelovich said...

If you'd like to learn more about MPK20, please see the MPK20 home page. We also invite anyone interested in developing 3D virtual worlds for business to join our Project Wonderland open source community.

Sunday, June 17, 2007 4:22:00 AM  
Blogger epredator said...

aleister :-) I Meant I have not seen Innov8 running.
I have seen lots about it, but need to spend a bit of time to fit it into where we are all going :-)

Monday, June 18, 2007 12:42:00 PM  
Anonymous Chris Melissinos said...

The issue was that you had the wrong person from Sun involved in the discussion. Working in this space is not just about how we utilize compute power, but how we build environments that leverage real world mechanisms in a virtual environment to provide richer and deeper context to content.

If you have any questions about Sun and the work we are doing in virtual world/collaborative platforms, I invite you to talk to Nicole Yankelovich or hit me in SL. FirstName: ChrisMelissinos LastName:SunMicrosystems

Monday, June 18, 2007 2:41:00 PM  

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