[Beowulf] Re: Cheap SDR IB

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 09:53:10AM -0500, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> 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

The Second Life does the physics server-side. With the given technology,
a region (one virtual server) will become sluggish (and soon herafter 
crash) after some 60-70 avatars frolick in the area.

There's definitely potential for better interconnects and game
clusters (deja vu, we must have discussed this some 5-8 years ago).

> space has some fairly obvious boundaries -- different continents are
> plausibly on different servers in a realm cluster, ditto instances,

SL islands are rectangular boxes (the client used to crash spectacularly
when altitude exceeded a signed short int). The world tesselates trivially
on a 2d or 3rd grid/torus.

> 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.

To start with, writing distributed game servers with MPI would be a nice
touch. I'm not aware of any effort which does it. 
 
> 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.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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