'EVE Online' Sports Fastest Supercomputer In Industry
CCP Going for 50,000 Concurrent Users on a Single Shard
from 
Stardock Forums
Stardock Forums
CCP Games, makers of the EVE Online MMORPG have announced that they have acquired the most powerful supercomputer in the gaming industry for EVE's server cluster. The upgraded cluster will sport "dual-processor 64-bit AMD Opteron-based IBM BladeCenter LS20 blade servers, as well additional enhancements to the clusters Internet backbone." The cluster will now be able to manage over 150 million database transactions per day thanks to the 64-bit architecture from IBM.
Included in the new hardware is the bleeding edge in hard drive performance, solid-state drives or SSDs. The drives can handle over 400,000 random input/ouput calls per second and should help keep EVE Online's record setting concurrent user base safe. Currently CCP holds the world record for concurrent users on a single shard with 30,000+ but with the new infrastructure they hope they can push that incredible number to 50,000+. "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."
Included in the new hardware is the bleeding edge in hard drive performance, solid-state drives or SSDs. The drives can handle over 400,000 random input/ouput calls per second and should help keep EVE Online's record setting concurrent user base safe. Currently CCP holds the world record for concurrent users on a single shard with 30,000+ but with the new infrastructure they hope they can push that incredible number to 50,000+. "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."