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IBM Testing New Grid Technology with Quake 2

Posted by CowboyNeal on Fri Aug 22, 2003 07:03 AM
from the advances-in-fragging-technology dept.
IBM First Person Shooters (Games) Quake Entertainment Games
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.
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  • Can you? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Surak (18578) * <surak AT mailblocks DOT com> on Friday August 22 2003, @07:05AM (#6763680) Homepage Journal
    Can you imagine .... oh wait, those Beowulf jokes are WAYYY outdated aren't they? Can you imagine if we had a GRID of those? :)

  • IBM wants stress testing ? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (209368) on Friday August 22 2003, @07:06AM (#6763688)
    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.

    • Or updates.microsoft.com

      I find your assumption that people update windows machines amusing.

      Oh, wait. People don't. Viruses do it nowadays :)

    • I'm not sure web serving would ideally test this (I know it's a joke...I'm just wondering about this...). The article mentioned how the software would load balance the servers in the case of something happening like all of the players gathering in one corner of the map. Whereas in a typical system this might overload the server that was responsible for that portion of the map, the software would now spread out the load so that several of the servers would divide up the load for the one part of the map.

      S

  • All bots are now (Score:5, Funny)

    by Trigun (685027) <`xc.hta.eripmelive' `ta' `live'> on Friday August 22 2003, @07:07AM (#6763694)
    Giant blue gorillas with six million hit points, deadly accuracy, and are backed by a legion of undead lawyers.
    • Giant blue gorillas with six million hit points, deadly accuracy, and are backed by a legion of undead lawyers.

      And SCO is a puny little cockroach who tried to take them down.

  • sounds like nascent skynet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lingqi (577227) on Friday August 22 2003, @07:07AM (#6763695) Journal
    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?
    • Either way I for one look forward to a beowulf cluster of these steel and wire overlords, yeah?


      As a trusted Slashdot-personality I can help them with rounding up others to toil in their CPU-fabs.

  • Yes but (Score:5, Funny)

    by Salsaman (141471) on Friday August 22 2003, @07:10AM (#6763706) Homepage
    they forgot the most important question of all:

    How many fps were they getting ?

      • Re:Yes but (Score:3, Insightful)

        by CaseyB (1105)
        When you can render enough FPS, the only improvement left to make...

        Right, because we will never want better image quality than Quake 2.

        ... is better timing. That requires help from the gfx hardware, nothing difficult though, the Amiga could do it 15-20 years ago or something like that.

        Timing? Yeah, it's called vertical synchronization and double or triple buffering, and every graphics card in existence has it.

  • not a completely new idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jackb_guppy (204733) on Friday August 22 2003, @07:11AM (#6763711)
    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.

  • Old news.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jdreed1024 (443938) on Friday August 22 2003, @07:14AM (#6763725)
    Bah, they had game grids back in 1982 [imdb.com]. I bet IBM's version doesn't have lightcycles, either. Yeesh, get with the times, IBM...

  • Acid test (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zog The Undeniable (632031) on Friday August 22 2003, @07:14AM (#6763728)
    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.

    • Easier, you want to lag the thing?

      Setup a server and don't limit the number of projectiles used by the hyperblaster.

      Give every player an HB and unlimited ammo. Tell them to run around shooting those all over... that'll lag the grid.

      Of course, some of that is bandwidth driven... but, a good test nonetheless.
    • So what? Lets say that the death message is "[DC]_-Oob3rL33tS7ud-_ got a hole in the head". That's 44 bytes, assuming ASCII. Let's also assume that each death message is the same length, for simplicity's sake.

      Server: 4032 x 44 = 177408 = 173.25k that has to be sent out in a timely manner ("instantaneously" is a bit misleading). That's a lot to have to transmit quickly, but any server running on a decent pipeline should be able to manage it in 5 seconds or so.

      Clients: 63 x 44 = 2772 = 2.7k. Even 56k

      • Its because 63 'playerx died' messages each need to be sent to all 64 players. 63x64=4032

        Personally, I'd be more concerned with the 63 loads of gibbed players the remaining one has to draw on screen at once, but there you go.

      • Each players death has to be reported to each player. So each player will receive 63 death messages (presumably one for each of the other 62 dead players, and one for themself, except the shooter who gets 63 death messages). 63 x 64 = 4032.

  • Sounded good, until I got to this bit:

    When doing so, IBM's GameGrid software typically operated with latencies of 50 microseconds or less, according to Hammer.

    I hope thats a typo..

  • UDP/TCP (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zog The Undeniable (632031) on Friday August 22 2003, @07:23AM (#6763781)
    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?

    • Keep in mind that the "grid" tech is for server/server communications, not communications with the game clients, which could still be TCP (although highly unlikely, since clustering ALSO requires low latency.)

      I would not be surprised if most clustering technologies use UDP with something above it to handle the possibilities of loss, since they rely so much on low-latency communications.

  • Slasdot them (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Siener (139990) on Friday August 22 2003, @07:29AM (#6763818) Homepage
    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.
  • From the team that brought you Deep Blue [ibm.com], now comes the ultimate challenge, Deep Bot.

    Come on. If they are even going to do it as a sort of pet project IBM seems to have an abudance of geeks doing oddbal stuff for this to become one lethal bot.

    In other related news IBM invested 2 billion dollars in cybernetic research.

    In yet other future news McBride is kinda puzzeled why his house seems to be surrounded by skiny blue robots.

  • At no time were there more than 80 players connected?

    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.

  • Lame Matrix Reference (Score:3, Funny)

    by vgaphil (449000) on Friday August 22 2003, @08:00AM (#6763992)
    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

  • More Details (Score:5, Informative)

    by lkaos (187507) <anthony@NOsPaM.codemonkey.ws> on Friday August 22 2003, @09:08AM (#6764531) Homepage Journal
    This was actually an Extreme Blue [ibm.com] project this summer. In fact, it was out of the Almaden [ibm.com] 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...

  • Shared-world development? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Selanit (192811) on Friday August 22 2003, @09:20AM (#6764660)
    The article says:
    GameGrid dynamically partitions areas of the game map, including players and objects, onto different servers. If a player or object, such as a rocket, moves from one server to another, the first server sends the player's state--the player's name, vector, velocity, and statistics--from one server to the next. [. . .] Even if a player isn't physically "on" a server, he must still be able to "see" objects stored on another. The Quake code determines the state of the world every tenth of a second, Bethencourt said.
    Could this (or something like it) be used in a user-constructed world? I'm thinking of Active Worlds [activeworlds.com] and similar sorts of software, where people log in, and can then alter the landscape or build things using pre-defined shapes and textures. Kind of like Legos, only you can't step on 'em in the dark.

    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, [activeworlds.com] 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.

  • Play is Slow (Score:3, Informative)

    by Josuah (26407) on Friday August 22 2003, @12:26PM (#6766633) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:A Test? Riiiight. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sperling (524821) * on Friday August 22 2003, @07:16AM (#6763733) Homepage
      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...
    • 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.
    • 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.
      • It might also result in:

        1) The cluster committing suicide hoping that the next level of existence doesn't have 1337 |-|4>0rZ

        or

        2) Realize it is better for us, and well you know, go skynet on our weak flesh hides.

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