A Supercomputing Cluster For FPS Gaming

Paul E writes: " An atlanta company seems to have developed (modified?) a linux clustering platform that is very conducive to FPS games. These guys apparently have built a cluster that will be pushing 2 TerraFlops, which would easily put it between Blue Pacific and Blue Mountain . Interesting that the same time the .mil starts making FPS's, FPS platforms are outperforming some of the top defense labs."

Comments

No they haven't

[Dynedain]

They haven't built a gaming supercomputer...they have only created a linux server farm for hosting gaming servers. Just like Verio hosting web sites, but for game servers instead.

Whoopdeedoo.....

MAXIMUM 32 PLAYERS == LAME!

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to their site and "order" a server. Most games are limited to only 32 players - not exactly a "supercomputing" breakthrough...

They are NOT out performing the national labs

[nufsaid]

Just to put things in perspective. Pacific Blue
is an antique and dog slow and is now two generations/iterations behind the current facilities at the national labs.

My experience w/ military FPS....

[steppin_razor_LA]

When I was a grad student, I spent some time working on a force feedback system for one of the Army's distributed VR combat systems.

The system itself was sort of cool -- all sorts of different vehicles / soldiers could interact within the world. I remember that there was a serious lack of standards due to all of the proprietary BS -- so if you didn't have the various servers synched up with each other's databases, your A-10 might look like a flying tank!

I also remember that the "clients" were Indigo Impacts (the purple ones) -- at the time, these boxes provided the most bang for the buck in terms of high end 3D processing -- the next best thing were the Onyx (sp?) which were $500K - $1M. I remember being really disappointed with the quality / FPS of the simulations compared to what quake would do on my Riva 128 card (if my memory serves)..

I know that the Quake engine had its share of cheats that allowed it to gain the performance advantages it did, but I thought it was funny that a $2K PC was seriously outperforming a $40K workstation.

I remember writing a proposal for a better version of the system that would be java based where each of the vehicles would be an object/thread running in the environment (i.e. like those old programming contests where everyone would write C code that would fight each other). That way you could program intelligence into the vehicles and just pass the object around -- no need to have huge synchronized databases describing the vehicles properties .. they would just be properties of the object .. I proposed that they use VRML or something like that to allow the objects to describe themselves..