Server

Was just wondering about the server side of the game. I seen on the other post about cloud servers, I am wondering if you are planning on having a grid / cluster basded server as well? Are you planning on leaning toward the more turdional command based prompt server or are you going to make a gui one with options?

I have 40 servers just sitting around and was hoping I could use them to host a huge server. I dont know exactialy how to do cloud hosting. But I can setup a cluster or grid based enviroment.

....Admin?

Aaaand snowbella takes the lead in the largest privately owned PA server cluster race.

Oh my gosh, I just spit food all over my keyboard. Laughing so hard.

Yeah I kind of wonder what specifically people are going on about when they talk about cloud computing these days.

I remember back in college we did parallel processing where you'd use more than one processing thread to run a program with something like Open MP.
http://openmp.org/wp/

Back in the day there was this admin software that would let us network a computer lab together so you could get at all their processors. But I'd assume now that a lot of PCs have 4+ processors in them you'd have to handle parallel processing on nearly everything just to get the most out whatever machine your program is running on.

Open MP was really nice because of how scalable it was. you could write a program and start up as many threads as you wanted to, and as processors became free they'd automatically grab a thread. So you could write a program that didn't have an upper limit on the amount of processors it could use. For example you could have a for loop where each each iteration of the loop could be it's own thread. And if the for loop could run for 1000 iterations it could try to grab 1000 different processors, or just grab as many processors as are available at the time and throw the extra threads in the end of the queue.

Granted I have no clue what PA is doing about multiple processors

I was hopeing to run this on a 2-4 core with about 8 gigs or RAM. Are normal servers not going to be able to handle PA and you need multiple on a cluster to run a big game?

What kind of outgoing bandwidth do you have for these 40 servers?

It may be worth surveying everyone in general, to see what kind of internets they have.

It only matters if you are going to run a server for external people.

Lol support for server-clusters.

How about making PA capable of using supercomputers? Maybe somebody has a spare calculations-monster that we could use to make a 1000000 Planets game.
That kind of game would probably boring, because every PA-player there is would have dozens of planets to expand and nobody would have a reason to ever attack, but whatever xD

The question about the bandwidth is a good one, though:

Are there already indications of how much bandwidth are used per player for a server?
...probably not, I know xD

Currently my planned server setup is for an 8-core machine, with 64GB of RAM. (No, I can't compete with snownebula)

I'm hoping to run medium sized games for me and my ten friends (yes, I have exactly ten friends...)

Upload is 8Mb (BT Infinity), I'm assuming that this setup is likely to be sufficient for my modest purposes. Anyone care to venture an opinion?

You could use the drop in drop out system to make a year long game or so it could be pretty awesome!

And so be it the greatest game ever developed arises, where there are thousands of nations playing for dominance on an insane scale.

Back of the envelope I think you should be fine.

well if you let it run on a supercomputer, you could increase the physics simulation part, there doing that there anyhow.
But in that case it would be more of a problem to connect a client from the outside to the server, but you could always run a game with hundreds of AIs.


aside from that, the cluster question would be interesting still, if you could run one server on for example 2 standard PCs, to run a bigger server (assuming the network connection is good enough, etc).

I'm hoping to run a server on my linux dual core, 4GB ram machine. At least I have 100/100 fiber internet.

Each has its own static ip dsl 50/50 mps connection. All linked with a 1k gig lan backbone switch.

The exact server specs are as follows:

40x Dell PowerEdge 1750
Dual Xeon 3.06 Ghz 64 bit dual core each (yes you can run 32 bit on them I tested.)
4 Gigs ram @ 800 MHz
1x 36 GB HD @ 15k rpm
1x 100 MB LAN
1x 1 GB LAN

I can run both windows or linux on them. I use one as a linux sql server.

My Cluster is almost as fast as your 40 with my 5

5 Servers each with: (4 DL380G5s and 1 Rackable)
2 x Quad Core Xeon Procs (Pre-Turbo)
32GB of RAM
4 have 3* 36GB 15K SAS with 5 * 146GB 10K SAS
1 Has 4 * 250GB 7.2K SATA
Sadly only a 22Mb/22Mb connection though

That's not counting all the other crap I have lying around, Anyone need a 4U Dl585 G1? Or older 1U IBM servers? Or PE2850s? Heck I even have spare APC L5-20 Powestrips I want to off load. And as I think more, there is also a Cisco Catalyst 5505 in there as well. I need to stop collecting stuff....

**Edit Fixing Generation of 585