Inside the World's Largest LAN Party

MrSeb writes "Last weekend, over 12,000 LAN party goers turned up at DreamHack Winter 2011 in Jonkoping, Sweden with a PC under the arm, on their back, or packed carefully in the trunk of their car. Every single attendee is squeezed into just three massive halls — the largest holding 5,000 computers — or four days, only taking brief breaks to sleep or check out one of the many stages (including some of the largest e-sport tournaments of the year). Being the largest LAN party in the world, DreamHack's infrastructure is suitably monumental: it takes days to lay the thousands of cables, and at the heart of the network is tower of Cisco routers that interface with a 120Gbps internet connection provided by Telia."

Recipe For Disaster

[BLT2112]

With all the things that usually go wrong at my LAN parties of 4-8 people, I can only imagine the potential frustration at a gig like this!

120 gbps

[lister king of smeg]

where can i get that kind of connection speed, and how much does it cost

Re:Recipe For Disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

..duplicate name detected, IP address conflict. How many of them forget to switch from static IP addressing to dynamic?

Re:Connectivity

[BZWingZero]

I suspect the chances of all 12,000 people using their internet bandwidth at the same time was pretty likely. Especially since they asked people to try and max it out at a specific time to set a utilization record.

http://www.dreamhack.se/dhw11/2011/11/22/120-gigabit-at-dhw11/ [dreamhack.se]

Re:Yeah, pictures are nice.

[clarkn0va]

With a 120 Gbps internet link, the terms "inside" and "outside" kind of lose some of their significance.

Re:Oh my! All those sweaty geeks in one place.

[PopeRatzo]

that really is it

Oh, then I guess I have indeed been to a LAN party, but just didn't know that's what it was called. I was Resident Faculty at a dorm for a while when I first started teaching. It was before I was married so it was just me and the dog. This was at a small Catholic liberal arts college in the bluffs of Minnesota along the Mississippi, so in the winter there was nothing at all to do outside at night. We'd drag out our computers and play Starcraft or Total Annihilation for hours and hours. Drink Leinenkugel that we bought on the Wisconsin side and eat pizza if we could get a pizzeria from the small nearby town to deliver in the heavy snow.

When we got wasted enough, we'd take cafeteria trays and use them to slide down the side of a rather steep bluff. Then we'd take someone to the hospital. In the wee hours we'd stand on the roof and look at the Northern Lights.

The son of the mayor of a medium-sized city lived in the dorm and always had great weed. The dorm was in a building that was once a monastery. One wing was said to be haunted and a lot of weird stuff did happen over there, but predictably, it usually happened when we were buzzed. I know I was supposed to look out for these kids but really it was all much harmless fun and nobody got hurt. I was a newly-minted academic, just a few years older than my charges. I did occasionally give a little advice and a sympathetic ear, but mostly just made sure nobody went overboard.

OK, so now I know. Those were "LAN parties".

Thanks.

Re:Yeah, pictures are nice.

[ahotiK]

Well, I was there and the speed was actually near 100mbps for download and about 60-70 mbps for upload from the outside and 100 mbps (up and down) for the inside as 100 mbps is the maximum for those switches. It's impresive they could get that speed and bandwidth for 12000 people but the link speed isn't that impressive per se as my connection at home is almost as good.