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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.

12 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Can you? by Surak · · Score: 4, Funny

    Can you imagine .... oh wait, those Beowulf jokes are WAYYY outdated aren't they? Can you imagine if we had a GRID of those? :)

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  2. IBM wants stress testing ? by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:IBM wants stress testing ? by Gherald · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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      The unofficial /. digest
  3. All bots are now by Trigun · · Score: 5, Funny

    Giant blue gorillas with six million hit points, deadly accuracy, and are backed by a legion of undead lawyers.

  4. Yes but by Salsaman · · Score: 4, Funny
    they forgot the most important question of all:

    How many fps were they getting ?

  5. not a completely new idea by jackb_guppy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:not a completely new idea by lovebyte · · Score: 5, Funny

      I remember when in the mid-90's we used to call playing doom and later quake : Network testing

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      I'll do it for cheesy poofs.

  6. Old news.... by jdreed1024 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Bah, they had game grids back in 1982. I bet IBM's version doesn't have lightcycles, either. Yeesh, get with the times, IBM...

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    There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
  7. Acid test by Zog+The+Undeniable · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Line all the players up and have one of them fire a railgun through the remainder [1]. Allegedly someone tried this at a LAN with 64 players and the server crashed. The problem is that the server has to send 4,032 death messages instantaneously. With 250 players it would have to do 62,250.

    [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.

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  8. Re:A Test? Riiiight. by sperling · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

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    The next great MMORPG.
  9. 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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    When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
  10. 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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