Largest Online Simulation

DigitalRibbon Conducts Largest Online Gaming Simulation Ever

February 20

With the 6th fastest computer in the world, Digital Ribbon simulated over 120,000 concurrent users to stress test on Quazal online gaming platform.

"The project was a great success, thanks in part to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and Quazal" - Stated Erik Weaver CEO Digital Ribbon Inc. "The customer came to us needing to stress test their online lobby scalability, to ensure it could handle the heavy load anticipated. The simulation was also very successful at identifying and improving the engines performance.

"Working with Digital Ribbon allowed the high-fidelity simulation of very large numbers of concurrent players hitting our Rendez-Vous lobby system. With this unique load testing capability, we were able to optimize our code so that when it came time to go live with our client’s game, it was rock solid at huge volumes." said Henry Ryan COO Quazal Technologies.

The biggest challenges we faced were delivering short-term supercomputing power on a Windows platform. Our business model is similar to EC2 (Amazons on-demand computing) and Network.com (Sun's on-demand) we deliver supercomputing power on-demand with varying level of technical assistance in the process. In the past we have forced client to migrate to Linux, however the tools in the gaming industry are not readily available for Linux. Rewriting to code would have been to costly and time consuming. Placing Windows high performance tools has a unique market position.

We over came this with assistance from 6th fastest computer in the world (according to top500.org) and Microsoft HPC team, and are now glad to be the only true on-demand solution provider that offers Windows Supercomputing solutions. There are no Linux tools to do this kind of simulation at scale.

"Simulation is rapidly becoming an essential tool to increase productivity, and testing games is no exception," said Shawn Hansen, Director of HPC Marketing at Microsoft Corporation. "Historically, testing a game's ability to scale has been manual, difficult and time-consuming. With Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and .NET, Digital Ribbon was able to improve time-to-market by automating the testing of large-scale internet gaming."

During the project we seriously considered breaking the gaming engine simply to understand how much it could handle, with the 6th fastest computer in the world out could have easily scaled beyond 500,000+ users.

No one is believed to have ever tested/simulated more than 5000 users before. Competitors generally test a game by handing out free copies or plugging a vast number of game consoles to the web and waiting for results and/or melt down -which does not produce good data.

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About Digital Ribbon Inc., DRI is the leading grass roots exchange of Computational Resources (CR) for growing on demand consumers who are apprehensive about expanding developmental cost and project deadlines. DRI exchange currently has direct access to capacity exceeding 9.5 million CPU hours a month. Our largest single image system in our constellation of resources has over 4,600 cores, and 2 gigs of bandwidth. The resources we represent are extremely diverse (32bit, 64bit) processors, multiple interconnect technologies (including Infiniband) and one of the largest Windows clusters in the world.

About Quazal Quazal is the leading supplier of multiplayer middleware solutions for the entertainment industry. World-class publishers such as EA, Vivendi, Capcom, Eidos, Midway, CodeMasters, THQ and Ubisoft are joining the ranks of dozens of studios and independent developers that use Quazal's products to propel today’s most successful multiplayer games. In 2000, Quazal revolutionized network programming by rendering obsolete the traditional packet/socket paradigm. Since then, Quazal’s offering now encompasses in-game network engines, hosted game lobbies and technical services. Quazal's products are currently available for "PlayStation®2", "PSP™"(PlayStation®Portable), "PLAYSTATION®3", Xbox®, Xbox 360™, Windows®, Mac OS X, and Linux. For more information and demonstrations, visit www.quazal.com

* Quazal Net-Z, Quazal Rendez-Vous and Quazal Spark! are trademarks of Quazal Technologies, Inc.