Warhawk PS3 Server Clusters

News for nerds writes "The official Sony Playstation blog posted the game server details of the upcoming online shooter game Warhawk. Interestingly the game's Ranked Dedicated servers, available in addition to user-hosted PS3 servers, are hosted in rack-mounted PS3 clusters."

Re:Well...

[fistfullast33l]

I think the article summary/article itself is a little misleading - my understanding is that these machines aren't necessarily creating a distributed network of nodes in one server as we would think of it. Instead it's just a bunch of PS3s running their own dedicated Warhawk servers individually. They're put in racks and spread around the globe to provide low latency connections to many different dedicated servers so that no matter where you are, you have access to at least a few dedicated servers that are constantly running with players on them. They're basically eliminating the need for you to run your own game and allow people to connect to you. You can still do this if you'd like, but it's not required if you're looking to get into a game quickly.

Note they also hype the fact that you have a list of eligible servers when you go looking to connect to a game - most of the PS3 games available today (The Darkness, Rainbow Six, Resistance) just randomly connect you to a game based on some search criteria you put in. It's actually rather annoying and I'm glad they're doing this for Warhawk.

Re:price/performance ratio?

[Weslee]

No linux on those PS3s. If you read the article, you'll notice that the game ships with a server mode. I'm guessing they just load a modified version of the game that ships (one that skips the graphics and runs in only dedicated mode), and just let it run.