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IBM Testing New Grid Technology with Quake 2

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the advances-in-fragging-technology dept.

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.

2 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. UDP/TCP by Zog+The+Undeniable · · Score: 4, Informative
    Quake and all its descendants use UDP. While this is faster than TCP, packets are inevitably lost but the game is designed to cope with this - it just picks up player positions again from the next packet that arrives, which occasionally gives jerky play (the impression to the player is of a very high ping).

    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?

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  2. More Details by lkaos · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

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