So, what do you get when you cross a Cell processor with an industry-leading mainframe system?

 The answer is a whole bunch of "wow."

 No doubt we'll be talking lots more about the "gameframe."  And keep an eye on our friends at the Mainframe blog for more.  

I've been trying to think of something useful to blog about over the past week… scouring the news, the blogs, the boards.  But the truth is, it's awfully quiet out there.  Is it because the excitement of the new console releases has faded?  Is the industry simply in basic blocking-and-tackling mode, trying to get new titles out the door?  

Is anybody home?  Tell me something interesting… I'm starved for juicy information.

IBM has been holding these Global Innovation Outlook workshops around the world, and one of the key focus areas has been Media and Content.

In particular, a recent post on the GIO blog talked about the Shanghai session and how games could be a bridge to the future.  Money quote:

The Chinese people believe they have great stories to tell, and they are eager to express them to the rest of the world. But there are great challenges. The government still controls the media industry here, a fact that came up repeatedly in our discussion. One participant lamented that China has loads of creative talent, but that artists don’t feel comfortable pushing artistic boundaries for fear of censorship. And investors, both domestic and foreign, are skittish about investing in an industry that comes with so much regulatory baggage.

Also, the language barrier is high. One participant suggested that gaming could serve as a bridge, both for culture and language, and even become the platform that delivers the educational and cultural advancement the group was looking for. Another suggested that China should concern itself with applying its manufacturing prowess to the production of content (like movie production etc.) from other countries, and then worry about creating its own content later.

My not-so-unbiased opinion is that traditional businesses in mature economies tend to dismiss games and entertainment as a sideline to "real business", yet we're seeing more and more examples of how games are bleeding into business through virtual worlds, leadership development in MMOs, and other "serious game" applications.  And here's a group in a rapidly growing (I don't know if you'de still call China an "emerging" economy) economy seriously considering games as a bridge for cross-cultural exports and a medium to accellerate cultural/media industry growth.

When a society like Korea can go mad over online games, when new game launches are as popular today as movie releases are (or once were), when even the most stodgy retail brands are jumping into virtual worlds, it's not hard to see how games and interactive entertainment can bring unexpected business value outside of generating entertainment revenues.

Barry Minor's post and video on Cell-based raytracing has created something of a stir. After being "Slashdotted" the video has more than 40,000 views on YouTube. He's clearly struck a powerful nerve within the graphics programming community. I can't wait to see what's next.

The open side of the PS3 is a good way to get access to Cell technology as a programmer. Just head down to Toys-R-Us and toss 200 gigaflops into your cart. Programs like Stanford’s PS3 version of Folding@home are showing that today’s game consoles can form very potent compute clusters. In the video below (sorry about serpent like sound track) we show our IBM developed iRT ray-tracer running on a small PS3 cluster. This car model is 75x more complex than those used in today's games and ray-tracing is a class of rendering algorithm only deployed by the film industry, yet PS3s when clustered together handle this problem with ease. Our code was written using the Cell SDK so the same binary that was developed for the QS20 blade runs fine on the PS3, no changes. We just grabbed our Yellow Dog DVD, installed Linux on the PS3s, copied over the iRT binaries, and in minutes we had a very low cost 600 gigaflop cluster. While it's no match for LANL's massive Roadrunner system the same code can be run on both clusters.