Butterfly, IBM Form Huge Online Game Grid

Butterfly.net Inc. and IBM Corp. have created a global network for online video games capable of supporting a million players or more that will be rented to major game publishers.

Butterfly Grid also will be one of the first major commercial applications for IBM’s concept of “grid computing,” in which far-flung computers are linked using open-source software to create powerful computing networks, IBM said.

Start-up Butterfly will provide software and IBM will provide the operating hardware for the grid under a three-year capacity-on-demand contract paid by Butterfly.

Currently, most big multi-player online games can support multiple users in the hundreds of thousands, but Scott Penberthy, vice president of business development for IBM Global Services, said accommodating millions of simultaneous users was possible if games were built correctly.