Inside the World's Largest LAN Party

MrSeb writes "Last weekend, over 12,000 LAN party goers turned up at DreamHack Winter 2011 in Jonkoping, Sweden with a PC under the arm, on their back, or packed carefully in the trunk of their car. Every single attendee is squeezed into just three massive halls — the largest holding 5,000 computers — or four days, only taking brief breaks to sleep or check out one of the many stages (including some of the largest e-sport tournaments of the year). Being the largest LAN party in the world, DreamHack's infrastructure is suitably monumental: it takes days to lay the thousands of cables, and at the heart of the network is tower of Cisco routers that interface with a 120Gbps internet connection provided by Telia."

Comments

Re:Recipe For Disaster

[icebike]

The power requirements alone must be enormous. Most buildings are simply not wired to handle an inrush of 12000 monitors, and the computers they are hooked to.

It must have required totally separate power structures and a totally separate power feed separate from the building mains. This wasn't held at a typical office building, but rather in an empty-shell type of auditorium.

Check out the air quality in picture 2 vs picture 3.

Wow. some truly happy people there.

[unity100]

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/107245-inside-the-worlds-largest-lan-party/16

check out the eyes of the guys laughing. thats a real laugh, and their eyes are shining with real happiness. been a while since i saw such people in media images.

Re:Oh my! All those sweaty geeks in one place.

[compwizrd]

My guess is picture 3 is the aftermath of the smoke generator you can see is running in picture 1.