Slashdot Mirror
Million Man LAN
stovey-san writes: "LanWar(EAST: Louisville,KY) and LANtrocity(WEST: L.A., CA) are teaming up to form one of the largest lanparties ever, MillionManLan. Check it out, both sides are to have up to 2,500 participants with linked networks for the ultimate fragfest for a total of 5,000 gamers! Lanwar 12 is starting tomorrow (Sat-Sun) with a sold out 562 gamers, so expectations are high! MML takes off on May 25 for SIX straight days!"
Actually, just a quick follow-up to my earlier post...
For the longest time, I thought it would be cool to build a "render-farm" about the size of a refrigerator. I'd build this huge box about 6 feet cube. On two opposite sides, I'd put large double doors (with locking capability) to access the hardware inside.
Inside this large box, I'd put 4 racks, one in front of each door, so that you'd only have to open one door to access one rack.
I'd build 6 boxes for each rack, each containing, I estimate, 10 small single-board computers, each with individual power supplies and large hard drives. This would make 60 computers per rack, for a total of 240 computers inside the 6 foot cube. Actually, it wouldn't exactly be like that, because I'd get a few rackmount SGIs and put them in there as well.
The entire cube would be temperature insulated and cooled by two separate techniques simultaneously. First, it would contain an elaborate liquid cooling system. Antifreeze would be cooled down to very cold temperatures and run through a series of pipes through the cube. Each rack would receive 6 pipes, one for each box on the rack. Each box would have a pipe running through it, going in between all the blades of a heat sink on each CPU, as well as any component of the power supply that I feel needs super cooling. There would be no fans on the power supplies, so they wouldn't take up so much room. After travelling through one box, the antifreeze would make another pass through the main cooler before continuing on to another box on the same rack, and then on the next rack, etc.
The "main cooler" would actually be a series of radiators sitting inside a small freezer, with a large fan blowing the freezing air through them, by the way.
In addition to the liquid cooling system, there would be an air conditioner large enough for a good sized room installed on top of the cube, inside a cool looking enclosure. All extra space beside and behind the racks would be for air conditioning ducts. Cold air would blow on all the electronic components, keeping them nice and cool. Like I said before, the entire 6 foot cube would be temperature insulated. The doors would seal the unit shut when closed, for the most part. This would keep most of the dust outside, and allow the air conditioning to remain a "closed" system.
In the same room as this monstrocity, I'd build a large table in the shape of a U, or more like an O, but with an opening, so that a person (me) can sit inside the center. There would be 3 or 4 (or maybe 5) sets of monitors, keyboard and mouse on this desk. These would be dedicated X Window Systems, booting over NFS from one of the computers inside the cube.
Now here's what I'd do with this mess. I'd be able to run stable and current versions of all the BSDs, quite a few Linux distros, one or two or about 10 built-from-scratch distros of the above, several OS/2 installations, just for fun, and a bunch of computers running various virtualization software, such as VMWare or Bochs (or whatever they renamed their project to)... the SGI boxes would obviously run IRIX. Collectively, this big "computer" would allow a whole mess of software to run. Some of the computers would be dedicated to compiling kernels and programs. Others would run databases, where I'd store just about everything I could dream of. Collectively, the entire system would act as a huge data storage unit, making just about everything accessible to just about all the computers through NFS, SMB, FTP, or whatever protocols I decide to use. All of this would be accessible from the dedicated X boxes on the circular desk.
Once I have built one of these, I'll improve on the design and build more, until my entire house will be full of computers from floor to ceiling, leaving barely enough room to crawl around in access passages, and these computers would do just about every kind of processing there is... I might even have a network of 25 computers acting just as an elaborate firewall! Of course, before I can even start this project, I have to win the next huge lottery jackpot.
Oh well... Nobody said you can't dream about crap like this. :-)
Oregon's Million Man Lan was last fall. The server admins ditched the MML2k organiser and started the Northwest Lan Gaming Association, and they're doing The Promised Lan this spring.
Obligatory disclaimer: I used to date the Parid guy, and I came up with the name. And yes, we asked the Aussies first.
Be nice to that tpl.net server, kids. Oregon/Washington gamers, please go have a look. NWLANGA wants to make this a regular kind of thing.
All of these are ISPs, but specifically geared toward gaming -- that is, low ping, ample game servers, admins available to kick cheaters, etc. Most of them have a presence on QuakeNet, for those IRC-inclined.
Someday the States will have a gaming ISP as well.