Alright, sorry for the confusion. Our commercial offering (SpaceBase) is very much targeted at MMOs and real-time LBSs. However, like many start-ups we really do like building cool stuff. And while it indeed the case that Galaxy will soon be a offered as a component of SpaceBase, it is has a very different design from other memory-grid projects/products, so we decided to open-source it to the community and let it explore other possible uses.
My post was meant to be an introduction to a series of very technical blog posts discussing theoretical and practical aspects of distributed systems. The post was not meant to serve a clear commercial purpose, so I was trying to steer the discussion away from commercial uses and more to its CS aspects. You know, we really find this stuff interesting. Some of my future posts will discuss the more theoretical sides of Galaxy and will drill very deeply into its design and algorithms, while others will discuss how SpaceBase will make use of Galaxy to help MMOs build huge, rich worlds, and LBSs track lots of moving objects in real-time. To be more concrete and give just a taste, I'll say this: when SpaceBase runs on top of Galaxy, objects are transferred from one node to another to create a dynamic area-of-responsibility for each node. This means that each node will be responsible for processing all objects in some region of the game world (or real world for LBSs). But the regions are dynamic - namely, they shrink and grow to accommodate non-uniform load, so that small busy areas will be split over several nodes, while large, relatively vacant ones will be handled by just one.
My post was meant to be an introduction to a series of very technical blog posts discussing theoretical and practical aspects of distributed systems. The post was not meant to serve a clear commercial purpose, so I was trying to steer the discussion away from commercial uses and more to its CS aspects. You know, we really find this stuff interesting. Some of my future posts will discuss the more theoretical sides of Galaxy and will drill very deeply into its design and algorithms, while others will discuss how SpaceBase will make use of Galaxy to help MMOs build huge, rich worlds, and LBSs track lots of moving objects in real-time. To be more concrete and give just a taste, I'll say this: when SpaceBase runs on top of Galaxy, objects are transferred from one node to another to create a dynamic area-of-responsibility for each node. This means that each node will be responsible for processing all objects in some region of the game world (or real world for LBSs). But the regions are dynamic - namely, they shrink and grow to accommodate non-uniform load, so that small busy areas will be split over several nodes, while large, relatively vacant ones will be handled by just one.