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| Simulation News
Febuary 20 2008 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 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.
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