Big blue gaming - News Flash - Butterfly.net, IBM offer online game service, infrastructure - Brief Article

Electronic News, May 13, 2002

COMPUTER GAMING MAY BE THE RODNEY DANGERFIELD OF computing, but it does spur quite a few sales as enthusiasts continually upgrade their PCs in order to play the latest, hardware-intensive games. And now big IBM Corp. and little Butterfly.net Inc. are doing their part to make sure even more PC owners have a reason to buy new equipment.

Shepherdstown, W.Va.-based Butterfly.net, a self-described development studio, online publisher and infrastructure provider for large-scale game networks, will demonstrate the Butterfly Grid later this month at the E3 trade show in Los Angeles. The Butterfly Grid, built on Linux-based IBM eServer xSeries systems and running on internal fiber optic networks--IBM is the host--could potentially support more than 1 million simultaneous video game users, according to Butterfly.net. The Grid handles the computing load by distributing the necessary processing across multiple server farms, the company said.

Butterfly.net provides client software libraries to video game developers that want to run their games on these meganetworks, the company said. The software libraries and code for connecting PCs both stationary and mobile as well as game consoles such as Microsoft's Xbox or Nintendo's Game Cube is available on the company's Web site.