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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 oh wait, those Beowulf jokes are WAYYY outdated aren't they?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
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
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.
How many fps were they getting ?
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.
> At what point do you have a responsibility to the code that you spawned
Obviously a troll, but I'd say my criteria is "self awareness." That's all that is important.
The unofficial
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.
[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.
80 normal users don't stress the system, but 80 l337 |-|4>0rZ armed with the latest aimbot technology, scraming "I h8 K4mP3rz! D347h 2 4ll, \/\/3 4r3 1337!" would stress even the most well constructed system.
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
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.
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
Easy - when it starts complaining. That's the most reliable Turing test there is.
On a related note, I would suggest you watch a little less scifi, and maybe take a programming class or something.
sic transit gloria mundi
We did quite a lot of "network load testing" back in high school.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
Most current games also use some retransmission while still using UDP, as well. The key is that you have much more control over the overhead if you build your own retransmission protocol in UDP packets than if you let TCP do it for you.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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.
Quake II was ported to .NET!
h ttp://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/quake/
http://www.vertigosoftware.com/Quake2.htm
or
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
In Corporate America, the Grid fails YOU!
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));
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.
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.