Friday, March 24th @ GDC
PlayStation University: Introduction to PS3
Speaker: David Coombes (Platform Research Manager, Sony Computer Entertainment Amer)
Date/Time: Friday (March 24, 2006) 10:30am 11:30am
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-minute Sponsored Session
Experience Level: All
Session Description
This is a high level introduction to the design and philosophy of a next generation console. The talk focuses on the radical architecture of the PS3 and the new approaches that will be needed to exploit this power.
Intended Audience
This talk is intended for attendees of all technical levels.
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PlayStation University: Introduction to the PS3 SPU's
Speaker: Geoff Audy (Senior Developer Support Engineer, SCEA)
Date/Time: Friday (March 24, 2006) 12:00pm 1:00pm
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-minute Sponsored Session
Experience Level: All
Session Description
This presentation will introduce the PlayStation 3's Synergistic Processing Units, and will give an overview of ways to utilize them in games.
Intended Audience
This talk is intended for attendees of beginning to intermediate technical levels.
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PlayStation University: Cell for Digital Media Acceleration
Speaker: Bruce DAmora (Senior Technical Staff Manager, Emerging Systems Software, IBM T.J.Watson Research)
Date/Time: Friday (March 24, 2006) 2:30pm 3:30pm
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-minute Sponsored Session
Experience Level: All
Session Description
The Cell processor, designed by a collaboration between Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, is the processor used in the PlayStation 3. In this talk, Bruce will first detail an architectural overview of the various on-chip components, highlighting interfaces and bus bandwidths. A description of some of the established programming models for the Cell will be explored, as well as their application to various demos running on the Cell architecture. Performance implications will be discussed.
Intended Audience
Developers who are working on software which runs on the Cell processor, whether games, visualization, or other applications, will benefit from attending this session.
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Crowd Simulation on PS3
Speaker: Craig Reynolds (Research Scientist, Sony Computer Entertainment Am)
Date/Time: Friday (March 24, 2006) 4:00pm 5:00pm
Track: Programming
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Experience Level: Advanced
Session Description
Crowds and other forms of flock-like group motion are modeled with interacting particle systems. These multi-agent simulations are computationally expensive because each agent must identify its nearest neighbors. Time to run the simple implementation grows as the square of the number of agents, so large groups can be prohibitively expensive. This lecture will describe experiments running crowd/flock simulations with thousands of individuals at 60 frames per second on the PLAYSTATION®3. It will discuss how a traditional crowd system can be recast to map efficiently onto the Cell architecture of the PS3. The lecture will include implementation details and live demos will be shown.
Idea Takeaway
Describes a new high performance crowd/flock simulation system designed to make efficient use of the Cell multiprocessor architecture of PLAYSTATION®3. As of today this appears to be the fastest crowd simulation ever built. The current technology demonstration software supports a flock of 7000 individuals at 60 frames per second. The presentation will include demos and detailed discussion of algorithms, data structures and the multiprocessor approach taken in this work.
Intended Audience
This lecture is aimed primarily at experienced AI programmers yet may appeal to the broader game programming community. It assumes some familiarity with behavior simulation and steering behaviors. Familiarity with PS3's architecture will help, but architectural details significant to the talk will be explained for the uninitiated.
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Source: GDconf.com
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