IBM Testing New Grid Technology with Quake 2

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.

Can you?

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 oh wait, those Beowulf jokes are WAYYY outdated aren't they?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 ?

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.

Re:IBM wants stress testing ?

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.

The Rights of Software ?

If you design an AI bot, and let it loose in a system like a Q2 game running on a set of nodes, do you have the right to arbitrarily shut it down? At what point do you have a responsibility to the code that you spawned (a Q2 pun, work with me)?
As Dr. Chandra said in 2010, we're all life forms, whether silicon or carbon based it makes no difference.

Re:The Rights of Software ?

At what point do you have a responsibility to the code that you spawned

Easy - when it starts complaining. That's the most reliable Turing test there is.

On a related note, I would suggest you watch a little less scifi, and maybe take a programming class or something.

All bots are now

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

sounds like nascent skynet

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?

Yes but

they forgot the most important question of all:

How many fps were they getting ?

not a completely new idea

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.

Re:not a completely new idea

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

80 Users

80 Users stress the system? 80 isn't really alot of users, especially since they are talking about implementing the technology for MMORPGs.

Old news....

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

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.

Quad damage + AIX

Someone please give me a quad damage so I can unload on our AIX boxes the way I've always dreamed.

50 microseconds.. yeah!

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..

Now for suitable visuals...

So we run a grid of computers (or Playstation 3's?) with Quake 2, but on a monitor? nooo... it needs to go on a CAVE [deltasearchlabs.com]

UDP/TCP

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?

MMORPG - Mass Murdering Online RPG?!?

As the article said (yes, I actualy had read it) IBM is exploring new consumer markets for their GRID tecnology... Gaming is BIG MONEY, and IBM is just taking their shot at it, too bad GRID systems are too expensive to be sold as video-game consoles!

Now, forget Quake2 and imagine this system running Battlefield 1942!! I already can see the Omaha Beach Battle with 500 players online, that's would be awesome!

Slasdot them

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.

Mmmm, deep bot

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.

U.Winsconsin Url for the project?

I would like to know if there are patents on the grid technology, and on MMORPGs based on that kind of technology. Also, has someone found the url for the project of the University of Winsconsin?

Having trouble generating a load?

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

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

In related news...

Quake II was ported to .NET!

http://www.vertigosoftware.com/Quake2.htm
or
h ttp://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/quake/

Bots skin...

I can see it now... [caldera.com]

Why Quake2?

Why did they use the boring Quake, when the much faster, more furious, and more fun Quake is also opensource?

Great technology for implementing The Matrix

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.

Public Use?

"IBM is also planning on developing Quake 2 bots to take advantage of the system."

So will they be releasing the Quake 2 bots to the public after using them? I think it'd be interesting to see how they coded them and how well they play.

Yay! IBM has started the Matrix project

All we need now is for some people to design better man-machine interfaces, like a direct connect into the spinal cord. And let's have those AI programmers show their metal by making some wickedly smart bots.

Certainly it would become boring killing people ad-infinitum, so I imagine it's just a matter of time before someone plugs in non-death oriented action into the Doom engines (and their kin). I myself would like to see a Half-Live/StockExchange!

Project Link???

Is this released to the public? If so, where is the link? Anyone? Thanks in advance!

More Details

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?

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.

SKy Net?

Is this how Sky Net got started, with Quake 2 Bot AI's? I never could keep up with the hurt me plenty level bots. Please help us John Conner!

My new excuse at work...

I'm not playing games, I'm evaluating IBMs new grid technology.

Yes the grid supports Solitare!

One thing ..

...I didn't understand .. it didn't what? Scale or stress the system?

Play is Slow

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.

Anyone else looking for more information?

Although IBM encouraged researchers to download the GameGrid-enhanced Quake 2 application, only 870 did so. In a stress test performed Wednesday, only 80 players were on the map at any one time.

Did they want a better turnout? Then perhaps they should have mentioned it to people like me who actually still play QuakeII!

The article has no links to the project itself. The best I found in my google searches is the resume [wisc.edu] of one of the UW students who worked on it. I can see why IBM may want to hide this project for the prying eyes of competitors, but since this is indeed GPL application they're modding, you'de think they'de publish the source somewhere. Perhaps the icculus.org q^2 [icculus.org] developers should request the source in writing.

Quake 2? Odd

I will never understand why Quake 2 in particular has had as much developer/mod author attention as has seemed to. I also don't know what id were smoking when they released it...it was by far their weakest release, IMHO. The in-game AI was horrible, and the graphical engine itself was worse. To prove my point, it's worth remembering that the original Half-Life was built on a heavily modded version of Quake *1*, and that looked, played, and just generally *was* infinitely superior to Q2 in every possible way.
Q1 was IMNSHO id's crowning achievement, and remains the best multiplayer experience I've ever had.

Eraser Bot? HELLO!

So why is IBM making bots? Someone's already done that: http://impact.frag.com/ [frag.com]
Or are they making bots optimized for the grid? They should definitely start with the eraser bots instead of starting from scratch.

Re:A Test? Riiiight.

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...

Re:A Test? Riiiight.

I don't understand why you've been modded down as a flamebait, because you are absolutely correct.

Nothing stresses a system like a CPU and memory intensive simulation that grinds out gigabytes of data every second. How about some serious physics like evaluating quantum wave-functions of complex systems using path integrals or the configuration interaction formalism.

Re:A Test? Riiiight.

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.

Re:Don't understand

I should RTFA, I should...

It's about game servers, not clients. Apparently a normal Quake server can only cope with a small number of simultaneous players.

Can those people that modded me up as insightful please mod me down again? :-)

Re:A Test? Riiiight.

Yes but only the UBER Geeks see the Phun in that. The rest of the world understand our primal instinct. (Can I eat it? Can I kill it? Can I....hmm nice sheep...:)

Re:ARRRGGHH M$ is here

its ok, mod the parent down as it has changed to a thinkgeek ad, thank god

S

Re:A Test? Riiiight.

This wouldn't test the system - the whole point, and unfortunately this was buried near the bottom of the article, is that the grid could repartition the map to ensure that no one node got swamped. The grid also has to move date between the nodes so that the game state was consistent between nodes - something that a chess analysis problem wouldn't need to do.

It might well be the case that this is a solution waiting for a problem.

Re:Screw Quake 2, do it with Vice City

naturally, vice city is a single player game. but, even though the game is closed source, there is an effort [multitheftauto.com] (which actually works to a decent extent) to make it multiplayer