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IBM Testing New Grid Technology with Quake 2
boschmorden writes "In conjunction with IBM, a group of college students from the University of Wisconsin developed GameGrid, a derivative of IBM's OptimalGrid effort. The students adapted the open-source version of id Software's Quake 2 first-person shooter, and attempted to scale it across the grid to stress the system." IBM is also planning on developing Quake 2 bots to take advantage of the system.
Can you imagine .... oh wait, those Beowulf jokes are WAYYY outdated aren't they? Can you imagine if we had a GRID of those? :)
My journal has hot
800 ms is way too much!
IBM Corp. has begun a real-world test of its grid-computing system by turning to a familiar geek pastime: games.
I'd have hosted Slashdot instead. Or updates.microsoft.com.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If you design an AI bot, and let it loose in a system like a Q2 game running on a set of nodes, do you have the right to arbitrarily shut it down? At what point do you have a responsibility to the code that you spawned (a Q2 pun, work with me)?
As Dr. Chandra said in 2010, we're all life forms, whether silicon or carbon based it makes no difference.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Giant blue gorillas with six million hit points, deadly accuracy, and are backed by a legion of undead lawyers.
bots that runs on distributed clusters, designed to take out humans in a simulated environment... hmmmm
if we arm them (the programs) with paintball guns we can do simulated battles from the terminator universe.
or until they get a hold of some real firepower and this becomes a real version of the terminator universe...
Either way I for one look forward to a beowulf cluster of these steel and wire overlords, yeah?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
C'mon. I'm sure there are better ways to test the system. How about some complicated mathmatics? Why not just load up the chess software and let it analyze every possible move?
This is just the design team's wet dream. Not that I blame them, but c'mon- is it really news? Nerds like to play games??? Alert the press!
How many fps were they getting ?
Seeing as we're back on Quake2 developemnt I thought I'd mention the /. article about Quake2.NET for those who missed it the first time round.
/ 142216&mode=thread&tid=112&tid=127&tid=186&tid=204 &tid=206
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/14
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
I know of large company that install quake servers 6 years ago to help balance 3 T3 lines. The quake servers (w/ players) gave a continous load that was easy to define and route, which helped in supporting a very large website.
80 Users stress the system? 80 isn't really alot of users, especially since they are talking about implementing the technology for MMORPGs.
Bah, they had game grids back in 1982. I bet IBM's version doesn't have lightcycles, either. Yeesh, get with the times, IBM...
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Imagine 80 Tommy Vercettis wreaking havoc on that little beach community. Oh joy! Oh nirvana.
[1] for the uninitiated, a Quake 2 railgun slug keeps going through any number of targets until it hits a wall or other part of the scenery.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Chess software just requires massive processing. The whole point with this grid is to be able to do real-time simulations, and any decent game is exactly that.
They got a point though, this is more suited for MMORPGs, I'd believe any modern MMORPG would use some sort of clustering solution. The response times they mention seem decent, but I can't help but wonder what they'll look like in a real scenario with a few thousand players and a limited hardware budget.
We're doing something similar here at work, but I'd be fired in an instant if I spent 8 servers to sustain 80 users...
The next great MMORPG.
Someone please give me a quad damage so I can unload on our AIX boxes the way I've always dreamed.
Nothing stresses a system like a CPU and memory intensive simulation that grinds out gigabytes of data every second. How about some serious physics like evaluating quantum wave-functions of complex systems using path integrals or the configuration interaction formalism.
BOO! TERRO
When doing so, IBM's GameGrid software typically operated with latencies of 50 microseconds or less, according to Hammer.
I hope thats a typo..
Like calculating PI to the most possible decimal places, or prime number calculations? The only problem with these is its hard to spread the processing power, but with games theres lots of dfiferent things to spread, like graphics, sound, AI so you can take advantage of the cluster where as calculating decial places can require one machine in a cluster to finish before another can start, thus being a bad test.
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
I should RTFA, I should...
:-)
It's about game servers, not clients. Apparently a normal Quake server can only cope with a small number of simultaneous players.
Can those people that modded me up as insightful please mod me down again?
So we run a grid of computers (or Playstation 3's?) with Quake 2, but on a monitor? nooo... it needs to go on a CAVE
Yes but only the UBER Geeks see the Phun in that. The rest of the world understand our primal instinct. (Can I eat it? Can I kill it? Can I....hmm nice sheep...:)
Data-critical processes - that's most real-world applications - have to use TCP to ensure completeness of transmission, so maybe this isn't the best test for the grid?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
As the article said (yes, I actualy had read it) IBM is exploring new consumer markets for their GRID tecnology... Gaming is BIG MONEY, and IBM is just taking their shot at it, too bad GRID systems are too expensive to be sold as video-game consoles!
Now, forget Quake2 and imagine this system running Battlefield 1942!! I already can see the Omaha Beach Battle with 500 players online, that's would be awesome!
heh, I had 72 Q2 bots running on one machine to form a crowd... It runs in real-time, albeit slowly!
The problem with Q2 for a stress test is that it has hard coded limits for players and entities. Changing these values means the entire protocol has to be redesigned... So, in effect, you can't get more than 80 bots without a lot of work!
Maybe they should have chosen an Open Source MMOG engine like NeL?
its ok, mod the parent down as it has changed to a thinkgeek ad, thank god
S
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
Seems like there main problem was that they did not get enough people connected simultaniosly to really put the system under any kind of stress. They should announce the next test on /. - I'm sure they'll get more than 80 users then.
siener's youtube channel
Unfortunately, the reality is that one solid server can host 64 people in Quake 2, and they only got the grid up to 80 people (which really probably could be done on a single modern server if you built the map for it). Sure, Quake and Q3 only do 32 players, but Carmack was really big on the idea of really big games back when he put together Q2, and there were a handful of 64-player maps available.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
i'm sure they already did the dead-test (e.g. complicated mathematics), but what is a car worth if it's just tested in the lab on a bench, but has never seen a road? also the sprits running around controlled by geeks (riiiight) is unpredictable (only statistically predicatable and that's what we gamers do real-time in the brain ("where's the rocket-launcher/BFG?")).
why use a grid to compute, please? just make a huge processor! i thought networks are to share information (not one way TV style)?
Are the IBM lawyers bored by SCO to start playing games?
Come on. If they are even going to do it as a sort of pet project IBM seems to have an abudance of geeks doing oddbal stuff for this to become one lethal bot.
In other related news IBM invested 2 billion dollars in cybernetic research.
In yet other future news McBride is kinda puzzeled why his house seems to be surrounded by skiny blue robots.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We did quite a lot of "network load testing" back in high school.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Interesting and shameless plug:
SCTP is another transport protocol that is in the works. It allows for multiple streams of data between multihomed computers. The streams may be in order or out of order which allows for related data to be transported reliably without head of line blocking. If a strictly ordered stream is necessary, that may be bundled in with the out of order streams.
Quite a nifty protocol. Quite beast to try and write ;-). It might make the grid more easily usable in many situations instead of adding retransmissions into the application protocol.
Sam
its "open source" so they changed a whole bunch of stuff, including the hard coded limits
Keep in mind that the "grid" tech is for server/server communications, not communications with the game clients, which could still be TCP (although highly unlikely, since clustering ALSO requires low latency.)
I would not be surprised if most clustering technologies use UDP with something above it to handle the possibilities of loss, since they rely so much on low-latency communications.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I would like to know if there are patents on the grid technology, and on MMORPGs based on that kind of technology. Also, has someone found the url for the project of the University of Winsconsin?
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"
If that really was a problem they should've just hooked it up to the internet and put an invitation up on some game sites. Surely IBM can foot the bandwidth bill that would result from it.
Does it run Quake^H^H^H^H^HDoom 3?
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
IBM is also planning on developing Quake 2 bots to take advantage of the system
Dont't they mean "agents".
"The Internet is a fad" -WB
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
This wouldn't test the system - the whole point, and unfortunately this was buried near the bottom of the article, is that the grid could repartition the map to ensure that no one node got swamped. The grid also has to move date between the nodes so that the game state was consistent between nodes - something that a chess analysis problem wouldn't need to do.
It might well be the case that this is a solution waiting for a problem.
Wouldn't it be funny if they ran a modified version of psdoom on this. PSDOOM
Quake II was ported to .NET!
h ttp://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/quake/
http://www.vertigosoftware.com/Quake2.htm
or
As I understand the article, they had 80 players on hand, and that wasn't enough to find the problems with the grid overloading.
I can see it now...
Why did they use the boring Quake, when the much faster, more furious, and more fun Quake is also opensource?
The Team Arena add-on for Q3A is able to do 64 players smoothly, as well as the games based on the Q3TA engine, like RTCW. I regularly play on Happy Penguin Classic, which has a 64 player server. It's been a while since I've played Q2 online, but from what I remember even the 64 player servers hosted on high end machines behind fat pipes were still kinda laggy.
GameGrid dynamically partitions areas of the game map, including players and objects, onto different servers. If a player or object, such as a rocket, moves from one server to another, the first server sends the player's state -- the player's name, vector, velocity, and statistics -- from one server to the next.
So will they be releasing the Quake 2 bots to the public after using them? I think it'd be interesting to see how they coded them and how well they play.
in terms of actual pages served up? obviously slashdot serves more pages than it's membership goes off site to read
in terms of bytes? slashdot is rather low bandwidth-
99 %text NO photograph complex jpgs.. no avi's or mpegs..
it's quite possible that /. server does not have requirements nearly as intense as some sites that /. manages to swamp
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
YOU FAIL IT!
In Corporate America, the Grid fails YOU!
All we need now is for some people to design better man-machine interfaces, like a direct connect into the spinal cord. And let's have those AI programmers show their metal by making some wickedly smart bots.
Certainly it would become boring killing people ad-infinitum, so I imagine it's just a matter of time before someone plugs in non-death oriented action into the Doom engines (and their kin). I myself would like to see a Half-Live/StockExchange!
Is this released to the public? If so, where is the link? Anyone? Thanks in advance!
This was actually an Extreme Blue project this summer. In fact, it was out of the Almaden lab.
Extreme Blue is a program where IBM hires three CS college students and one MBA student to work on exciting new technologies. The official party line is that Extreme Blue is IBM's incubator for talent, technology, and business innovation.
Lots of cool things come out of Extreme Blue. They ran an IBM-wide test of this Quake2 grid thing. It was pretty cool...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
they didnt call the bots "agents" because they didn`t want to get sued by WB like SCO did for that Unix code thing.
or maybe they plan to sell the bot AI they are developping to the people who are working on the Matrix MMORPG and don't want to give any hints to anyone about it?
Anyway, would it be feasible to run such a thing using a grid? Currently, the size of such a shared world is limited by the power of the server on which it is hosted. Alphaworld, the largest world in the Active Worlds universe, is only about the size of California. But if you were using a grid, you could then theoretically expand the world by adding more nodes to handle more real estate. (Or virtual estate, rather.)
If you could find a situation with low enough latency, individuals could even provide their own nodes, adding new territory to the fringes of an existing world. Neaaaat.
Is this how Sky Net got started, with Quake 2 Bot AI's? I never could keep up with the hurt me plenty level bots. Please help us John Conner!
-ZiN-
No...there's an obvious problem: how about a real-world military application? I.e. troop data including position and whatever else they'd have sensors for could better be spread to other units and in a more realtime fashion. Though I'd have to think the DOD already has something like this going on...
I had problems with Q3, so I never bought Q3TA and can't really comment on that.
. It's been a while since I've played Q2 online, but from what I remember even the 64 player servers hosted on high end machines behind fat pipes were still kinda laggy.
I never had a problem with the 64 player servers, except that there weren't many of them and they didn't often fill up past 32 people (so maybe they did have problems, or at least many people perceived problems with them).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I'm not playing games, I'm evaluating IBMs new grid technology.
Yes the grid supports Solitare!
I predicted this, see, see?!?
Infuriate left and right
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
I'm an engineer. The question is irrelevant, which actually was my point. Pity, I couldn't get it across.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
...I didn't understand .. it didn't what? Scale or stress the system?
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
I, for one, welcome our new QuakeBot overlords.
Was that the head hunter mod?
Plato seems wrong to me today
A friend of mine play-tested the GameGrid but found that it didn't play very well. Instead of mapping sections of a larger map onto servers, it seemed to map sections of individual rooms onto servers. This meant you hopped servers fairly often, instead of just when moving from one large area to the next (probably the right thing to do overall, to avoid massive load during huge combat). But the problem was an extremely noticeable lag when crossing those boundaries, making the game all but unplayable.
Anyway, this is the feedback he gave me after he tried it. I didn't have time to try it myself during the short play-testing phase they had.
Did they want a better turnout? Then perhaps they should have mentioned it to people like me who actually still play QuakeII!
The article has no links to the project itself. The best I found in my google searches is the resume of one of the UW students who worked on it. I can see why IBM may want to hide this project for the prying eyes of competitors, but since this is indeed GPL application they're modding, you'de think they'de publish the source somewhere. Perhaps the icculus.org q^2 developers should request the source in writing.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
I've seen Zona's FPS grid game at GDC for the past couple of years. Looks like Mad Max meets Mario Carts, lots of shooting, quite impressive with low latencies. Quake Derby-ish. I got their dev kit -- they use clustering, dynamic spatial ownership, object shadow proxying. What IBM is doing is nothing new -- I think they are just goofing off.
I will never understand why Quake 2 in particular has had as much developer/mod author attention as has seemed to. I also don't know what id were smoking when they released it...it was by far their weakest release, IMHO. The in-game AI was horrible, and the graphical engine itself was worse. To prove my point, it's worth remembering that the original Half-Life was built on a heavily modded version of Quake *1*, and that looked, played, and just generally *was* infinitely superior to Q2 in every possible way.
Q1 was IMNSHO id's crowning achievement, and remains the best multiplayer experience I've ever had.
So why is IBM making bots? Someone's already done that: http://impact.frag.com/
Or are they making bots optimized for the grid? They should definitely start with the eraser bots instead of starting from scratch.