Online gaming

[Skippyluvs]

Hi all,

I was curious does anyone know what kind of server system or configuration (software, hardware, types of servers, number of servers) popular online games like starcraft 2, world of warcraft, eve online use?

Any ideas on all that, what do you figure?

SK

[Tripredacus]

Well Blizzard has used server farms for Battle.net as far back as when Diablo II: LOD came out. The exact configuration could be anything really. They could have a couple high-end systems or they could have a hundred mid-range systems. It is still common that the world's fastest computers are actually parallel processing systems that use fairly low-end processors. For example, when Sandia National Labs' Amazing Teraflops Machine went operational, it was made up of a few thousand 200MHz CPUs or something. Actually:

This is the same computer that achieved the one-trillion math-operations per second computing milestone last December in a test demonstration at Intel's Beaverton, Ore., plant. That demonstration, however, was achieved using 7,264 Pentium Pro processors in 57 cabinets, or three-fourths of the full machine.

http://www.sandia.gov/media/online.htm

[CoffeeFiend]

Well Blizzard has used server farms for Battle.net as far back as when Diablo II: LOD came out.

Server farms are pretty much the only way.

They could have a couple high-end systems or they could have a hundred mid-range systems.

You're REALLY far from it 2 boxes would get you absolutely nowhere. For something with as many users, even a couple hundred high end boxes wouldn't be much. Try 13250 server blades (which is not bad -- facebook had 30000 a year ago, just to serve some web pages), totaling 75000 CPU cores and 112.5TB of RAM (as of sometime last year). Nevermind the small army of programmers, sysadmins and everything else (like money) you need to make something like this happen.

It is still common that the world's fastest computers are actually parallel processing systems that use fairly low-end processors.

Parallel processing clusters (HPC) and gaming server farms are 2 different worlds. And if you look at most systems on the top500 list, you'll see very few using sucky CPUs (there's plenty of 6 and 12 core monsters though -- often paired with fancy GPUs too)

For example, when Sandia National Labs' Amazing Teraflops Machine went operational, it was made up of a few thousand 200MHz CPUs or something. Actually:

That was actually a demo. Nobody is actually using that kind of stuff in a HPC cluster. That's pretty darn slow for a HPC cluster too: a mere 1.8 teraflops, whereas a single Radeon 5970 GPU can do 4.64 teraflops in FP32 by itself (or a mere 0.928 for FP64). Sandia actually uses Sun x6275 blades running a total of 10610 Xeon X5570's ($1386/ea in qty of 1000 -- hardly Pentium Pros), yielding a performance of 433.5 teraflops. If you want impressive, look at Tianhe-1A (2566 teraflops)