7 ms·

London-based Improbable unveils SpatialOS for distributed simulation

68 points by ggambetta 11y ago

jackgavigan 11y ago
I'm surprised that none of the companies in this space are applying this sort of technology to simulating financial markets.
- jandrewrogers 11y ago
  There is a big difference in computational requirements between simulating a system and constructing/analyzing a model of a system from measurements, doubly so if the system being modeled is live. To put it another way, you typically can't use virtual world platform computer science to build a mirror world platform that captures complex dynamics happening in reality. Very different problems. For financial markets, modeling and analyzing systems as they are measured is far more useful (and what is done in practice), so spatial simulation platforms are not that interesting.
- MasterScrat 11y ago
  > Simulated worlds provide unique insight to those asking questions of complex systems. As well as enabling completely new experiences in gaming, simulated worlds can solve significant problems in areas as diverse as defence, energy, city efficiency, health, and finance. https://angel.co/improbable https://angel.co/improbable They'll get to it trust me...
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  The point of this project/company is that the agents are spatially embedded. Markets are almost abstracted from their physical layout (with the exception of high-frequency stuff where the speed of light breaks the abstraction).
- DennisP 11y ago
  I signed up for early access, and they asked what business I was in. Choices included games, academia, and finance.
roymurdock 11y ago
Sounds more like Virtual Software/Infrastructure as a Service than a conventional OS: Unsurprisingly, working in SpatialOS will require special skills. Games can still be built with the Unity engine, though they'll also need to be able to work with Scala, the native SpatialOS language. However, Narula said the World's Adrift team needed "very little" training. From there, it's simply "pushed" out onto Improbable's infrastructure, and congratulations, you're a maker of worlds. Cost Structure: Narula wouldn't reveal pricing, but you only pay for usage – if no one is in your world, there's no cost – and he suggested Bossa's ability to build Worlds Adrift shows it's affordable. If I'm understanding this correctly, it's more that they're building large, persistent "environments" that can easily integrate with existing development and modeling software. Virtual sandboxes for playing and testing. Anyone have enough info to provide clarification?
- k33n 11y ago
  > need to be able to work with Scala This kills the startup.
  - kumarm 11y ago
    Are you suggesting not supporting a language thats not in top 25 languages today is their #1 problem?
    - inspectahdeck 11y ago
      I think he's suggesting that only supporting a language thats not in top 25 languages today is their #1 problem
  - kodablah 11y ago
    Disagree. Being able to work with Scala doesn't mean you have to write Scala always (depending on how they structured/exposed it). And even if it does mean that now, since it's on the JVM, it is not an unreasonable effort to create language-specific facades. Saying something "kills the startup" is extreme.
howeman 11y ago
Is there technical information on this somewhere? How is this different from AWS and from a traditional supercomputer? If I write a shared-memory parallel computation could I just run it on their platform (assuming I've done the work to make sure it can scale), or do I need to use MPI/a special language to make it all work?
- ggambetta 11y ago
  There's more information on the website: http://improbable.io/learn-more http://improbable.io/learn-more
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Looks like you need to use Scala for this. As for the comparison with supercomputing: this falls decidedly in the abstracted/virtualized/cloud category, which is basically the opposite of a supercomputer, where you're very close to the metal (i.e. C/C++ or Fortran). Efficient supercomputer usage requires hard thinking about communications (both between nodes with MPI and between the RAM and the CPU on each node), avoiding cache thrashing at all cost, and making use of all the performance intrinsics you can.
devit 11y ago
MMORPG backend as a service?
- JackFr 11y ago
  Better summary than TFA
modeless 11y ago
So... it's Second Life as a service.
- oscargrouch 11y ago
  best TL;DR
tsurkoprt 11y ago
Nothing new under the sun - this sounds just like Ab Initio Co>OS (https://www.abinitio.com https://www.abinitio.com started somewhere in 1995 and I would say the best piece of software code I've seen in my 20 years - not working for them anymore, so it is not advertisement).
- david-given 11y ago
  Well, I had a look at their website. It takes twenty seconds to load. (I timed it.) And all that delay is deliberate; it's stupid animations and scrolly things, all of them unskippable. Once it's loaded you now have a different stupid scrolly thing which is almost impossible to navig... Oh god. It's flash. The whole site is one huge flash page! What is this, the 1990s? If their marketing and PR department is so utterly out-of-touch that they think this is a good idea, I shudder to think what the engineering's like!
lucaspiller 11y ago
Gamasutra has a more gaming focussed article on it: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/256015/Improbable_How_a_team_of_15_builds_a_physicsbased_MMO.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/256015/Improbable_How_a_t...
nemitek 11y ago
First time I saw a post about these guys I said that they're just using the actor pattern...now I hear that they use Scala...another point for actors!
mhroth 11y ago
The hype all sounds well and good, but it seems to be what they're really offering is an opportunity to do "large scale" monte-carlo simulations. Which is also a great thing, but the results of said simulations will only be as good as the detail to which they are modeled. The example that they give about utilities modeling usage in a city is great, but someone is going to spend a whole lot of time modeling the details of the city, and constantly verifying that those results match up with the real world. I spent a lot of time doing these kinds of simulations in school...
yeureka 11y ago
I am a bit sceptical about this startup. Two friends interviewed there and both weren't impressed. One of them is the best developer I know, with decades of cutting edge AAA games engine development experience, including in the MMO space and his words were: "they have no clue about games development and don't have much more than vapourware" I hope he is wrong though and that the company is successful. They seem to be one of the few games related companies to compete with finance on compensation packages in London.
- bnjm 11y ago
  Interesting, did he mention any specifics? They seem to be aiming to create a general platform that's not specific to games. They also do have a few marketing / business managers which might be why it sounded like vapourware? As far as I can tell they have a lot of talent in the engineering department.
c0g 11y ago
From an chat with one of their employees, my understanding is that they have a nice SDK to make it easy for people to write simulations thay scale well, by enforcing some constraints: Dependencies between agents are local and can be expressed by simple messages Low dimensional and smooth action space Simple per-agent dynamics From what I've heard it isn't going to revolutionise anything, but it might make more massive open world space MMORPGs which I'm strongly in favour of.

68 points by ggambetta 11y ago

I'm surprised that none of the companies in this space are applying this sort of technology to simulating financial markets.

jandrewrogers 11y ago
There is a big difference in computational requirements between simulating a system and constructing/analyzing a model of a system from measurements, doubly so if the system being modeled is live. To put it another way, you typically can't use virtual world platform computer science to build a mirror world platform that captures complex dynamics happening in reality. Very different problems. For financial markets, modeling and analyzing systems as they are measured is far more useful (and what is done in practice), so spatial simulation platforms are not that interesting.
MasterScrat 11y ago
> Simulated worlds provide unique insight to those asking questions of complex systems. As well as enabling completely new experiences in gaming, simulated worlds can solve significant problems in areas as diverse as defence, energy, city efficiency, health, and finance. https://angel.co/improbable https://angel.co/improbable They'll get to it trust me...
robotresearcher 11y ago
The point of this project/company is that the agents are spatially embedded. Markets are almost abstracted from their physical layout (with the exception of high-frequency stuff where the speed of light breaks the abstraction).
DennisP 11y ago
I signed up for early access, and they asked what business I was in. Choices included games, academia, and finance.

roymurdock 11y ago

Sounds more like Virtual Software/Infrastructure as a Service than a conventional OS: Unsurprisingly, working in SpatialOS will require special skills. Games can still be built with the Unity engine, though they'll also need to be able to work with Scala, the native SpatialOS language. However, Narula said the World's Adrift team needed "very little" training. From there, it's simply "pushed" out onto Improbable's infrastructure, and congratulations, you're a maker of worlds. Cost Structure: Narula wouldn't reveal pricing, but you only pay for usage – if no one is in your world, there's no cost – and he suggested Bossa's ability to build Worlds Adrift shows it's affordable. If I'm understanding this correctly, it's more that they're building large, persistent "environments" that can easily integrate with existing development and modeling software. Virtual sandboxes for playing and testing. Anyone have enough info to provide clarification?

k33n 11y ago
> need to be able to work with Scala This kills the startup.
- kumarm 11y ago
  Are you suggesting not supporting a language thats not in top 25 languages today is their #1 problem?
  - inspectahdeck 11y ago
    I think he's suggesting that only supporting a language thats not in top 25 languages today is their #1 problem
- kodablah 11y ago
  Disagree. Being able to work with Scala doesn't mean you have to write Scala always (depending on how they structured/exposed it). And even if it does mean that now, since it's on the JVM, it is not an unreasonable effort to create language-specific facades. Saying something "kills the startup" is extreme.

howeman 11y ago

Is there technical information on this somewhere? How is this different from AWS and from a traditional supercomputer? If I write a shared-memory parallel computation could I just run it on their platform (assuming I've done the work to make sure it can scale), or do I need to use MPI/a special language to make it all work?

ggambetta 11y ago
There's more information on the website: http://improbable.io/learn-more http://improbable.io/learn-more
semi-extrinsic 11y ago
Looks like you need to use Scala for this. As for the comparison with supercomputing: this falls decidedly in the abstracted/virtualized/cloud category, which is basically the opposite of a supercomputer, where you're very close to the metal (i.e. C/C++ or Fortran). Efficient supercomputer usage requires hard thinking about communications (both between nodes with MPI and between the RAM and the CPU on each node), avoiding cache thrashing at all cost, and making use of all the performance intrinsics you can.

devit 11y ago

MMORPG backend as a service?

JackFr 11y ago
Better summary than TFA

modeless 11y ago

So... it's Second Life as a service.

oscargrouch 11y ago
best TL;DR

tsurkoprt 11y ago

Nothing new under the sun - this sounds just like Ab Initio Co>OS (https://www.abinitio.com https://www.abinitio.com started somewhere in 1995 and I would say the best piece of software code I've seen in my 20 years - not working for them anymore, so it is not advertisement).

david-given 11y ago
Well, I had a look at their website. It takes twenty seconds to load. (I timed it.) And all that delay is deliberate; it's stupid animations and scrolly things, all of them unskippable. Once it's loaded you now have a different stupid scrolly thing which is almost impossible to navig... Oh god. It's flash. The whole site is one huge flash page! What is this, the 1990s? If their marketing and PR department is so utterly out-of-touch that they think this is a good idea, I shudder to think what the engineering's like!

lucaspiller 11y ago

Gamasutra has a more gaming focussed article on it: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/256015/Improbable_How_a_team_of_15_builds_a_physicsbased_MMO.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/256015/Improbable_How_a_t...

nemitek 11y ago

First time I saw a post about these guys I said that they're just using the actor pattern...now I hear that they use Scala...another point for actors!

mhroth 11y ago

The hype all sounds well and good, but it seems to be what they're really offering is an opportunity to do "large scale" monte-carlo simulations. Which is also a great thing, but the results of said simulations will only be as good as the detail to which they are modeled. The example that they give about utilities modeling usage in a city is great, but someone is going to spend a whole lot of time modeling the details of the city, and constantly verifying that those results match up with the real world. I spent a lot of time doing these kinds of simulations in school...

yeureka 11y ago

I am a bit sceptical about this startup. Two friends interviewed there and both weren't impressed. One of them is the best developer I know, with decades of cutting edge AAA games engine development experience, including in the MMO space and his words were: "they have no clue about games development and don't have much more than vapourware" I hope he is wrong though and that the company is successful. They seem to be one of the few games related companies to compete with finance on compensation packages in London.

bnjm 11y ago
Interesting, did he mention any specifics? They seem to be aiming to create a general platform that's not specific to games. They also do have a few marketing / business managers which might be why it sounded like vapourware? As far as I can tell they have a lot of talent in the engineering department.

c0g 11y ago

From an chat with one of their employees, my understanding is that they have a nice SDK to make it easy for people to write simulations thay scale well, by enforcing some constraints: Dependencies between agents are local and can be expressed by simple messages Low dimensional and smooth action space Simple per-agent dynamics From what I've heard it isn't going to revolutionise anything, but it might make more massive open world space MMORPGs which I'm strongly in favour of.