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London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation

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Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation

#21

Post by semi-extrinsic »

howeman wrote: post #4

Is 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?

Looks like you need to use Scala for this.

As for the comparison with supercomputing: this falls decidedly in the abstracted/virtualized/cloud category, which is basically the opposite of a supercomputer, where you're very close to the metal (i.e. C/C++ or Fortran). Efficient supercomputer usage requires hard thinking about communications (both between nodes with MPI and between the RAM and the CPU on each node), avoiding cache thrashing at all cost, and making use of all the performance intrinsics you can.

Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation

#22

Post by david-given »

tsurkoprt wrote: post #9

Nothing 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).

Well, I had a look at their website.

It takes twenty seconds to load. (I timed it.) And all that delay is deliberate; it's stupid animations and scrolly things, all of them unskippable. Once it's loaded you now have a different stupid scrolly thing which is almost impossible to navig...

Oh god. It's flash. The whole site is one huge flash page! What is this, the 1990s?

If their marketing and PR department is so utterly out-of-touch that they think this is a good idea, I shudder to think what the engineering's like!

Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation

#23

Post by yeureka »

I am a bit sceptical about this startup.

Two friends interviewed there and both weren't impressed.

One of them is the best developer I know, with decades of cutting edge AAA games engine development experience, including in the MMO space and his words were: "they have no clue about games development and don't have much more than vapourware"

I hope he is wrong though and that the company is successful. They seem to be one of the few games related companies to compete with finance on compensation packages in London.

Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation

#24

Post by c0g »

From an chat with one of their employees, my understanding is that they have a nice SDK to make it easy for people to write simulations thay scale well, by enforcing some constraints:

Dependencies between agents are local and can be expressed by simple messages

Low dimensional and smooth action space

Simple per-agent dynamics

From what I've heard it isn't going to revolutionise anything, but it might make more massive open world space MMORPGs which I'm strongly in favour of.

Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation

#25

Post by kodablah »

k33n wrote: post #10
roymurdock wrote: post #3

Sounds 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.

Disagree. Being able to work with Scala doesn't mean you have to write Scala always (depending on how they structured/exposed it). And even if it does mean that now, since it's on the JVM, it is not an unreasonable effort to create language-specific facades. Saying something "kills the startup" is extreme.

Re: London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation

#26

Post by bnjm »

yeureka wrote: post #23

I am a bit sceptical about this startup. Two friends interviewed there and both weren't impressed. One of them is the best developer I know, with decades of cutting edge AAA games engine development experience, including in the MMO space and his words were: "they have no clue about games development and don't have much more than vapourware" I hope he is wrong though and that the company is successful. They seem to be…

Interesting, did he mention any specifics? They seem to be aiming to create a general platform that's not specific to games. They also do have a few marketing / business managers which might be why it sounded like vapourware? As far as I can tell they have a lot of talent in the engineering department.
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