Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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));
Yes, that's a typo. We said 50 milliseconds. 50 us is ludicrous if you understand what is happening. 50 ms is actually pretty decent though. Quake II only generates server frames every 100 ms, so if the transfer occurs between them, it's essentially perfect.
John Bethencourt (one of the developers of GameGrid)
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.