EVE Online Now Runs On The Industry's Largest Supercomputer

Ever wondered what kind of computing monster it takes to run an MMO game with over 30,000 concurrent users on a single server shard? Because that's what EVE Online has been going through recently, and the game's population just keeps on growing. As the developers from CCP Games are looking forward to support at least 50,000 concurrent users in the future, they have announced a new upgrade to their server cluster which, according to them, now comprises the largest supercomputer cluster in the history of the gaming industry.

CCP's dream of having 30K simultaneous users became true just days ago, on September 4, when 30,538 EVE Online capsuleers zoomed their way into history by setting a new concurrent user record of over thirty-thousand simultaneous users on the Tranquility server. Their old hosting technology was already being pushed to the limit by this massive load, so EVE players should be happy about the newly announced supercomputer.

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. It 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. Just imagine how Quake 1 would run on that beast.

The next big thing for EVE now is The Path to Kali, the game's second major expansion. It should be released very soon (perhaps even this month), and it will be a great opportunity for CCP to put their new supercomputer to the test. Let's hope it all goes well for them, and mostly for the players as well.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)