Representatives from Zynga are coming to Cornell to talk about internships for students, as well as job opportunities for new graduates. An information session is planned for Thursday, November 18th.

Zynga Information Session
Date/Time: November 18th at 6 pm
Venue: Phillips 203
Description: Come hear about game development from the developer of Farmville. Learn what it is like work at Zynga. Be sure to bring your resume!

Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he investigates next-generation large-scale distributed systems. He is currently the technical lead of Project Darkstar, a multi-threaded, distributed infrastructure for massive multi-player on-line games and virtual worlds. He is the CS colloquium speaker for November 5th, and he will talk about his work in this area.

Horizontal Scale in Low-Latency Environments
Date/Time: November 5th at 4 pm
Venue: Upson B17
Abstract: Project Darkstar is an infrastructure designed for on-line games and virtual worlds. The infrastructure presents a simple, event-based programming model, and automatically spreads the load generated over all available cores on all available machines without the programmer needing to be aware that their application is running on multiple cores or multiple machines. To obtain the low latencies required, we are attempting to join together a set of novel techniques in the system. We rely in the ability to transparently move tasks generated by events from core to core and machine to machine. We have developed a data cache that is transactional, but trades off durability for low-latency while maintaining consistency. And we are using techniques taken from social network analysis to group players in a way that we believe will be more likely to co-locate interacting players, thus minimizing misses in the data cache.

As many of you may have noticed, the Spring semester offering of CIS 3000 (Introduction to Game Design) is now completely full. The enrollment cap is set by the physical capacity of CL³, and so there is not much that we can do to increase the size of the class.

If you are still interested in enrolling, Walker White has set-up a waiting list to get into the class. Please contact him to get on the waiting list. Students always drop the first week of class, as they determine whether or not they have the time to devote to such a large project, and so many of the people on the waiting list will actually get into the class. Preference is given to artists, but after that, the waiting list will be consulted on a first-come, first-served basis.