On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Spin it the other way. Scale your online gaming server cluster using IB, and you probably have something.
And they may well do this. There are a lot of problems in provisioning online MMRPGs with "Universes" that are shared with HPC clusters and with HA clusters. Most of the sane ones spin off the actual rendering onto the clients, but they are still responsible for managing a huge inventory of objects as well as all the NPCs, in realtime interaction with PCs, in a large distributed "space". In some cases e.g. WoW the space has some fairly obvious boundaries -- different continents are plausibly on different servers in a realm cluster, ditto instances, where there are clear "cuts" when your character is "moved" from one server to another. They may even partition continents, but to do that (and manage a smooth passage across "country" boundaries) they need bottlenecks to limit traffic and a region of real-time overlap where characters are maintained (as it were) on both servers. Here IB or gigE would be very useful. It also might let them increase the fineness or granularity of boundaries, increase the server capacity for handling large numbers of simultaneous gamers by adding more physical servers to handle the large numbers of players that can occur in any given continent or country, and so on. Actually, MMRPGs are fun both to play and to think about as a cluster problem. But the big companies tend to be a bit chary of revealing their technology, although I have read a few articles on the subject. It is likely that many of the details of their implementations remain hidden. rgb
Eric _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
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