This is an interesting look at the technology behind the MMOG’s that are becoming increasingly popular these days. 

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EVE ONLINE® LAUNCHES LARGEST SUPERCOMPUTER IN THE GAMING INDUSTRY RUNNING ON IBM SERVER TECHNOLOGY

Austin Game Conference – September 8, 2006 – CCP Games announced today the largest supercomputer cluster in the history of the gaming industry for EVE Online, one of the leading science fiction Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG). The upgraded server cluster features dual-processor 64-bit AMD Opteron-based IBM BladeCenter LS20 blade servers, as well additional enhancements to the clusters internet backbone.

"The sharp growth rate of EVE Online was pushing the limits of the technology we replaced," said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games. "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."

The EVE Online supercomputer cluster manages over 150 million database transactions per day on a 64-bit hardware architecture from IBM. The database servers don’t use traditional hard drives but instead Solid State Disks (SSD) which are recognize as the worlds fastest storage devices with over 400,000 random I/Os per second. The recent world record of over 30,000 concurrent users on a single shard is a testament to the clusters capabilities and CCP is looking forward to support at least 50,000 concurrent users.

"CCP has really innovated traditional MMOG design," said David Laux, IBM Global Executive, Games & Interactive Entertainment. "IBM is proud to provide the powerful technology that will bring new excitement to the EVE community and help CCP continue to be successful."

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