VP of Systems Engineering Ian Wilkes, Linden Lab

As Vice President of Systems Engineering, Ian Wilkes is responsible for all aspects of IT infrastructure at Linden Lab. An early member of the company, for the past six years Wilkes has led the development of the server technology behind the award-winning, 3-D virtual world of Second Life.

Wilkes and his IT staff are dedicated to providing a stable foundation for the continued growth of Second Life, and developing strategies to address key Second Life Grid scalability issues. Prior to joining Linden Lab, Wilkes served as Technical Lead at Zengine, Inc, where he managed the core application, database, and network architecture.

Previous experience includes development positions at the US Department of Energy's experimental super-computing division, and at game developer Hot-B USA. Wilkes holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Presentation: "Second Life: how it works (and how it doesn't)"

Track: Architectures you've always wondered about

Time: Friday 09:30 - 10:30

Location: Metropolitan I

Abstract:

Second Life offers users a rich, 3D virtual world where they can look how they want, build what they want, and even write their own software, all in a single space shared with thousands of other people. These days that means we have 100 million objects, 30 million scripts, and 50,000 people in-world at a time; user empowerment on this scale has never been attempted before.

This talk will explain how Second Life blends technology from video games, high-performance computing, web infrastructure, virtualization, and VOIP to keep all these virtual engines ticking over, as well as some of the more spectacular failures of the platform. We'll also discuss future technology directions.

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