Yesterday Luis Villegas and Sean Shypula gave an exciting talk at the Game Developer Conference (in Sanfran)

I'll tell ya what...  I'm personally stoked to hear anything about Bungie development in general.  First and foremost I'm a huge Bungie fan from a company and game perspective. 

<flashback>I had a copy of Marathon release day on my overclocked Powermac Quadra </flashback> 

Secondly they are moving a lot of their stuff to .NET/C# - which just makes me smile ;)

Its awesome to see this company grow and prosper and continue to put out quality games at such an amazing scale.  I'd have to chalk it up to the smart people they have working there.  However - what really hit home with me is the similarities between such dissimilar industries.

For example.. whether your grid solves daily Monte Carlo simulations for million dollar decisions in the energy sector - or whether your grid pre-compiles lighting in Halo 3 maps - the problems faced are the exact SAME.

Some of the daily issues Sean and Luis face:

• Application Abstraction (vitalization) from  the grid - allowing machines to be utilizes like a commodity.
• Dynamic Provisioning of services and environments. (lighting / rendering / payroll / mathematically determine whether Superman or Batman would win in a fist fight if Superman wasn't allowed to fly)
• Distributed Workflows and sub workflows
• Workflow auditing
• Debugging Grid Environment.
• Auditing Jobs
• Simplified Deployment
• Admin tools for configuration, deployment, provisioning
• Managing multiple environments (development, testing, production, etc)
• Real-time monitoring
• Performance tuning.

Do these issues sound familiar?  Sure!  Only most of us are writing enterprise level services for work and play games for fun - rather than work to make the games.

once more... every MS shop who faces these obstacles owes it to their team and their company - to checkout Aware Server and schedule a demo.

I don't know about you... but I'd get a kick out of knowing Master Chief uses Aware Server to keep his perfectly rendered helmet nice and shiny ;)

>rt