London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
#2I'm surprised that none of the companies in this space are applying this sort of technology to simulating financial markets.
Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
#3Sounds more like Virtual Software/Infrastructure as a Service than a conventional OS:
Unsurprisingly, working in SpatialOS will require special skills. Games can still be built with the Unity engine, though they'll also need to be able to work with Scala, the native SpatialOS language. However, Narula said the World's Adrift team needed "very little" training. From there, it's simply "pushed" out onto Improbable's infrastructure, and congratulations, you're a maker of worlds.
Cost Structure:
Narula wouldn't reveal pricing, but you only pay for usage – if no one is in your world, there's no cost – and he suggested Bossa's ability to build Worlds Adrift shows it's affordable.
If I'm understanding this correctly, it's more that they're building large, persistent "environments" that can easily integrate with existing development and modeling software. Virtual sandboxes for playing and testing.
Anyone have enough info to provide clarification?
Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
#4Is there technical information on this somewhere? How is this different from AWS and from a traditional supercomputer? If I write a shared-memory parallel computation could I just run it on their platform (assuming I've done the work to make sure it can scale), or do I need to use MPI/a special language to make it all work?
Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
#5Is there technical information on this somewhere? How is this different from AWS and from a traditional supercomputer? If I write a shared-memory parallel computation could I just run it on their platform (assuming I've done the work to make sure it can scale), or do I need to use MPI/a special language to make it all work?
There's more information on the website: http://improbable.io/learn-more
Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
#6I'm surprised that none of the companies in this space are applying this sort of technology to simulating financial markets.
There is a big difference in computational requirements between simulating a system and constructing/analyzing a model of a system from measurements, doubly so if the system being modeled is live. To put it another way, you typically can't use virtual world platform computer science to build a mirror world platform that captures complex dynamics happening in reality. Very different problems.
For financial markets, modeling and analyzing systems as they are measured is far more useful (and what is done in practice), so spatial simulation platforms are not that interesting.
Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
#7MMORPG backend as a service?
Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
#8So... it's Second Life as a service.
Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
#9Nothing new under the sun - this sounds just like Ab Initio Co>OS (https://www.abinitio.com started somewhere in 1995 and I would say the best piece of software code I've seen in my 20 years - not working for them anymore, so it is not advertisement).
Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation
#10Sounds more like Virtual Software/Infrastructure as a Service than a conventional OS: Unsurprisingly, working in SpatialOS will require special skills. Games can still be built with the Unity engine, though they'll also need to be able to work with Scala, the native SpatialOS language. However, Narula said the World's Adrift team needed "very little" training. From there, it's simply "pushed" out onto Improbable's in…
> need to be able to work with Scala
This kills the startup.