EVE Online Launches Largest Supercomputer In The Gaming Industry

At the Austin Game Conference, EVE Online developer CCP yesterday revealed that in order to keep up with the rapid growth rate of their highly successful MMORPG, they have launched the supposedly “largest supercomputer cluster in the history of the gaming industry”. The hardware consists of dual-processor 64-bit AMD Opteron-based IBM BladeCenter LS20 blade servers, with additional enhancements made to the cluster’s internet backbone.

This cluster manages over 150 million database transactions per day on a 64-bit hardware architecture. Instead of running on regular hard drives, the database servers are using Solid State Disks (SSD), the fastest mass storage devices available today. Having broken the record of 30,000 concurrent users on a server, CCP is looking forward to testing their cluster’s capabilities by supporting over 50,000 players simultaneously.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games, commented: “Our goal was to implement a scalable solution that could accommodate the influx of new subscribers and gracefully manage the steadily increasing demand put on our infrastructure. IBM provided us with optimized hardware that improved overall game performance and increased capacity, especially during peak server usage timeframes.”

EVE Online players will most probably notice no differences when logging on to their favourite game, but it’s always great to see MMO technology evolve – with this beast of a machine going at it, you’ll realize how big MMO games have become over the years.

At the Austin Game Conference, EVE Online developer CCP yesterday revealed that in order to keep up with the rapid growth rate of their highly successful MMORPG, they have launched the supposedly “largest supercomputer cluster in the history of the gaming industry”. The hardware consists of dual-processor 64-bit AMD Opteron-based IBM BladeCenter LS20 blade servers, with additional enhancements made to the cluster’s internet backbone.

This cluster manages over 150 million database transactions per day on a 64-bit hardware architecture. Instead of running on regular hard drives, the database servers are using Solid State Disks (SSD), the fastest mass storage devices available today. Having broken the record of 30,000 concurrent users on a server, CCP is looking forward to testing their cluster’s capabilities by supporting over 50,000 players simultaneously.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games, commented: “Our goal was to implement a scalable solution that could accommodate the influx of new subscribers and gracefully manage the steadily increasing demand put on our infrastructure. IBM provided us with optimized hardware that improved overall game performance and increased capacity, especially during peak server usage timeframes.”

EVE Online players will most probably notice no differences when logging on to their favourite game, but it’s always great to see MMO technology evolve – with this beast of a machine going at it, you’ll realize how big MMO games have become over the years.