Open Source Powers Second Life
Second Life is one of the fastest growing online communities in the Internet today. It is growing so fast that it might have to build data center resources rivaling Google. They are not quite there yet but they are definitely on their way. Here is an article on What Power’s Second Life.
Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said.
This definitely looks like a lot of new and emerging massive online applications are being built with commodity components Beowulf-style. When I worked on this in the late 1990s, we were considered nuts to rely on commodity hardware to run these types of applications. Commodity parallel computing was essentially an academic affair. However, these new developments definitely validate the model of using low cost commodity components for highly scalable and available applications. No big iron system can claim to have the scalability of Google, Flickr and Second Life using single non-clustered systems. Parallel computing is here to stay.
On another note, does this mean given a choice people would rather use Open Source in their second lives? Given a second chance? Nah. They would probably stick to their existing convictions in general. Besides, you don’t have to wait for a second life to use open source. Open source is perfectly available in your first life!
