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.

Comments

Re:IBM wants stress testing ?

[Gherald]

So you don't think hosting Slashdot itself takes more resources than hosting a site Slashdot links to?

I'll have some of whatever you are having.

Slasdot them

[Siener]

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.

Re:Acid test

[Boing]

So what? Lets say that the death message is "[DC]_-Oob3rL33tS7ud-_ got a hole in the head". That's 44 bytes, assuming ASCII. Let's also assume that each death message is the same length, for simplicity's sake.

Server: 4032 x 44 = 177408 = 173.25k that has to be sent out in a timely manner ("instantaneously" is a bit misleading). That's a lot to have to transmit quickly, but any server running on a decent pipeline should be able to manage it in 5 seconds or so.

Clients: 63 x 44 = 2772 = 2.7k. Even 56k modems can get this in no time.

I know there's a lot of other crap being sent over the line, but the worst that scenario should mean would be a few seconds of lag in the game while the server got back up to speed. What would really kill everything would be trying to model all of the gibs' physics all of a sudden, while simultaneously adding newly spawned players with new weapons.

Shared-world development?

[Selanit]

The article says:

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. [. . .] Even if a player isn't physically "on" a server, he must still be able to "see" objects stored on another. The Quake code determines the state of the world every tenth of a second, Bethencourt said.

Could this (or something like it) be used in a user-constructed world? I'm thinking of Active Worlds and similar sorts of software, where people log in, and can then alter the landscape or build things using pre-defined shapes and textures. Kind of like Legos, only you can't step on 'em in the dark.

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.