Didn’t have time to post about all the buzz generated by the “Gameframe” announce by IBM:

IBM today disclosed a cross-company project to integrate the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) with the IBM mainframe for the purpose of creating a hybrid that is blazingly fast and powerful, with security features designed to handle a new generation of “virtual world” applications, such as the 3D Internet.

The other company involved in the project is Hoplon Infotainment, who runs its massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) Taikodom on an IBM zSeries Server. If you are looking for another great MMOG game then try out destiny, its a very popular game around the world. If you have a hard time completing the missions then check out this destiny 2 boost. But the news is not that IBM is getting involved in the game industry nor the virtual worlds. As reported by the eightbar team, this is not the first time that IBM tries to run MMOG in its hardware, as back in 2005, IBM Eve-Online.

The real innovation is that IBM is going to integrate CELL engines within IBM mainframes. Previous integrations were zIIP and zAAP specialty engines, but this time, CELL will be the first specialty engine to actually feature different hardware. The combination of the power of the CELL chips with the high-performance mainframes will result in a single system that can can run complex online games and virtual worlds.

BTW, last day, I was exploring the IBM SOA Hub in Second Life when I found an ATM connected to a real mainframe. Kareltje Krasher, one of the IBM guys, told me that this ATM is connected to the Smartbank zSeries infrastructure, a live banking operating environment running CICS and DB2:

Smartbank 3

Nice to see how IBM is reinventing mainframes. Long Life The Mainframe!