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Warhawk PS3 dedicated server cluster - Awesome display

Tiduz said:
wow, then i wonder what it takes to make it overheat and beep, it didnt even do that but it had the loudest noise i ever heard a fan make, it was in dimmed sleep mode @ xmb, luckily i didnt have any heavy games running :D
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I don't know if it was a true story or not, but there was a thread a while ago that linked to somebody's blog. On the person's blog, they were freaking out because their PS3 wouldn't turn on. It turns out that the guy put black electrical tape over ALL of the air holes because he didn't want dust getting in. I'm guessing that was a little too much for the PS3 to handle. :lol :lol

Not only did it not have any airflow but whatever super-heated air that was in there, had no way to get out. A towel or cloth would at least let the air out.
 
elostyle said:
Well since sony makes these and probably has warehouses of them to spare it makes sense to use PS3s as servers.
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DAAAMMMNN YOOUUU!!! Beat me to it. When I saw the pics I thought, "Ya gotta do somethin' with all those PS3's".
Anyhow, good burn. I'm sure these clusters will shrink as Sony gets better games out and sells more consoles. :D
 
WhatRuOn said:
Ya your right, it may cost that much. However, a single unit can host more then 1 game. So the upfront cost comparison isn't really valid. Fault tolerancy is the issue here. Say the power supply dies in the PS3 server. That server is completely down, until they either replace the whole unit or get a new power supply in there. A server that costs $2-5 should have redundant power supplies and will not go down if a power supply dies...or if a hard drive dies...or if a stick of ram goes bad...etc etc
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This still doesn't tell the whole story of what's most cost effective though, because you have a question of software maintenance as much as hardware maintenance.

Fault tolerance is involved in either approach. You either have an abundance of cheaper servers, each running one or only a few hosted game instances, where the fault tolerance is based on the fact that a single hardware unit going down has an impact on a much lower percentage of the number of games being played. Or you have fewer, more expensive servers, each running more hosted game instances, in which case you invest in more elaborate fault tolerance for each piece of hardware because you can't afford to let one hardware unit go down as freely in the previous scenario.
 
Tiduz said:
PS3 has now officially blown me away, @ 4 AM i was charging my controller upstairs @ usb on pc, ps3 is downstairs, i always have a cloth on my ps3 when i dont use it so it doesnt atracts as much dust, i accidentally touched the ps button without knowing and went to sleep.

8 hours later my ps3 made an airplane noise. i turned it off panicking, and wait 2 hours. turned it on, and to my surprise it still works, ive been playing for a day and a half now and i notice no damage at all. holy fuck thats impressive imo. But i now turn it off @ the back when i dont play, just to be sure :lol
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lol trying to towel trick the wrong console aye?
 
kaching said:
This still doesn't tell the whole story of what's most cost effective though, because you have a question of software maintenance as much as hardware maintenance.

Fault tolerance is involved in either approach. You either have an abundance of cheaper servers, each running one or only a few hosted game instances, where the fault tolerance is based on the fact that a single hardware unit going down has an impact on a much lower percentage of the number of games being played. Or you have fewer, more expensive servers, each running more hosted game instances, in which case you invest in more elaborate fault tolerance for each piece of hardware because you can't afford to let one hardware unit go down as freely in the previous scenario.
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My point is that the latter will not go down. Unless, of course they are neglecting it.
 
tanod said:
It would have been better if he used the clip from the Chapelle show with the Hispanic guy from Half Baked.

"WRAP IT UP, B!!!"
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Thats what i thought the link was initially, but that one worked too :lol
 
tanod said:
It would have been better if he used the clip from the Chapelle show with the Hispanic guy from Half Baked.

"WRAP IT UP, B!!!"
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I thought the same thing!

Yo, you better wrap it up with that gavel B!

:lol

Edit:

Beaten by Birdie. :lol
 
WhatRuOn said:
My point is that the latter will not go down. Unless, of course they are neglecting it.
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Not a knock on your skills as a server admin but, in practice, neglect isn't the only thing that can cause a server to deepsix, regardless of what fault tolerance you've tried to provide.
 
g35twinturbo said:
Have you ever builted a server b4?

Any good server ranges from 2-5k
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good server... 2-5k... joke?

a good server for clustering is more like 10 - 15k..

imo blade centers aren't that great for clusters that are heavily accessed(slower).
 
pCeSlAyEr said:
good server... 2-5k... joke?

a good server for clustering is more like 10 - 15k..

imo blade centers aren't that great for clusters that are heavily accessed.
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yeah a "good" server, you can atleast run some servers @ once with around 5k. but a great server what most are accompanied to are around that range, but yeah justified my point even more :D
 
kaching said:
Not a knock on your skills as a server admin but, in practice, neglect isn't the only thing that can cause a server to deepsix, regardless of what fault tolerance you've tried to provide.
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Having 2 power supplies fail at the same time, or anything failing in a pair for that matter is like winning the lottery jackpot.
 
WhatRuOn said:
Having 2 power supplies fail at the same time, or anything failing in a pair for that matter is like winning the lottery jackpot.
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You're still only looking at this as a hardware issue.
 
It sounds weird to have mounted racks of PS3s but it makes sense in one respect - the Warhawk team have to eat their own dogfood, which in coding parlance means using what they inflict on everybody else. If their servers are PS3s running vanilla or slightly tweaked instances of Warhawk, then rest assured that the experience you get from 3rd party of servers is going to be pretty similar. Besides it doesn't make sense they'd run their servers on PCs anyway if others were using PS3s.
 
Dante said:
FireFight.JPG.jpg


;)
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I laughed. Hard :)
 
What crap analysis of their server farm can you do when you have no knowledge of their software? Are you assuming that they are running the regular client/server software on each unit? That's crazy.

Perhaps they have server software that runs on each system (perhaps under Linux), it's optimized for the SPU's, and they can run a dozen or so servers on each box. We don't know. In the very least, it will be software that can be easily maintained and monitored remotely and without a head.
 
As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to give you guys a bit of a “peek-behind-the-curtain,” to show you our sweet Warhawk server setup.

Those of you familiar with Warhawk already know that the game features a very unique server method that we call “Integrated Game Server” or IGS for short — the industry needs more acronyms don’t you think :-)

The Warhawk IGS method means that instead of us forcing players to be connected to the SONY “mothership” for any and all games, we instead let players host their own servers on their own PS3s. This is fairly unique and it enables a couple of really nice benefits.

First, since Warhawk is a global online game, our IGS method scatters game servers quite literally into player’s homes all over the planet — the US, China, Europe, Australia, and Japan! No matter where you live, what time you want to play, or what language you speak, you’ll always be able to get your game on.

Secondly, this helps with latency. If you havenÂ’t heard, Warhawk is a fast game, a very fast game, so we wanted to ensure you had the best chance of finding servers with good ping times. We also wanted to make sure people could host *and* play on their own servers. After all, why should you have to connect to a server a gazillion hops away when you know that there are Warhawk servers running in your state or city? Possibly on your same ISP? Maybe even friends in your neighborhood or buddies in your dorm?

Hence our desire to develop an IGS system for Warhawk.
...
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What exactly is "unique" about this approach? isn't that what 360 games do and people complain about?

I am glad they also provide the alternative of using dedicated servers (something that very likely has dedicated guaranteed bandwidth unlike our home connection) but I am trying to understand what do they do differently on non-dedicated server case.
 
Gadfly said:
What exactly is "unique" about this approach? isn't that what 360 games do and people complain about?

I am glad they also provide the alternative of using dedicated servers (something that very likely has dedicated guaranteed bandwidth unlike our home connection) but I am trying to understand what do they do differently on non-dedicated server case.
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Its unique because they have user peer-to-peer play, user dedicated servers, AND dedicated servers hosted by Sony and you get a server list full of filters with no BS match making.
 
Gadfly said:
What exactly is "unique" about this approach? isn't that what 360 games do and people complain about?
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You are thinking of peer-to-peer, which Warhawk allows also. However dedicated servers don't allow the host to play, and saves all the bandwidth for everyone in the game, thus reducing lag and having a more enjoyable game experience.
 
chubigans said:
You are thinking of peer-to-peer, which Warhawk allows also. However dedicated servers don't allow the host to play, and saves all the bandwidth for everyone in the game, thus reducing lag and having a more enjoyable game experience.
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Please read my post again. Of course I am talking about peer to peer and so (it seems) is the blog. But looks like the blog poster (which the quote is coming from) believes there is something unique about the way they do it and I wanted to understand what it is.
 
Gadfly said:
Please read my post again. Of course I am talking about peer to peer and so (it seems) is the blog. But looks like the blog poster (which the quote is coming from) believes there is something unique about the way they do it and I wanted to understand what it is.
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It's the fact that Sony is using wave after wave of PS3s instead of PCs that's unique.
 
captive said:
Its unique because they have user peer-to-peer play, user dedicated servers, AND dedicated servers hosted by Sony and you get a server list full of filters with no BS match making.
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They are using the term unique in the context of their peer to peer solution. and that's what I don't understand and I thought maybe I can learn something here.

I am not arguing the fact that they have other solutions in place to back up their peer to peer solution and it is very nice of them.
 
Gadfly said:
What exactly is "unique" about this approach? isn't that what 360 games do and people complain about?

I am glad they also provide the alternative of using dedicated servers (something that very likely has dedicated guaranteed bandwidth unlike our home connection) but I am trying to understand what do they do differently on non-dedicated server case.
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There's only a handful of console games that let users host their own dedicated servers. Hence "fairlyunique".
 
WhatRuOn said:
Having 2 power supplies fail at the same time, or anything failing in a pair for that matter is like winning the lottery jackpot.
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Am I the only admin on earth who had server motherboards (dell and compaq) fry for no good reason? Funniest I had was the onboard raid controller dying, killing all 4 hard drives on the raid5 with him. Now that was a fun day.
Nowadays all my servers at work are redundant, there is always a hot spare waiting doing nothing but replicating the data and being ready to take over the over one using heartbeat.
Don't ever trust a server, you may have the best hardware in the world, unless *everything* is redundant inside the box, and even then, something can go and will go wrong.
On the other side, I have a server that's been up 24/7 for 8 years now, it's a bridged firewall system (with a spare of course) for our network, and this old 486 is still useful :)
I guess the Warhawk guys are going for a google-like setup where everything is ultra redundant and can die without much consequences on the whole setup. I certainly wouldn't trust a console hardware to be reliable on the long term, even if the PS3 certainly seems to be built really well.
 
chubigans said:
It's the fact that Sony is using wave after wave of PS3s instead of PCs that's unique.
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In peer to peer solution (where they use the word unique twice), only consoles are used. that is true for every console MP game that uses peer to peer solution.
 
Gadfly said:
Please read my post again. Of course I am talking about peer to peer and so (it seems) is the blog. But looks like the blog poster (which the quote is coming from) believes there is something unique about the way they do it and I wanted to understand what it is.
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they do allow you to start your dedicated server, with options usually found only on PC games... I am not sure if any console game has such extensive server options as does Warhawk, so in a sense, it is revolutionizing FPS's on consoles.

On the other hand, they also have very strong dedicated server network of their own, which is an big plus as well.

Another thing to mention is that Warhawk has really good network code, that makes games under 200ms playable, which is certainly really good.
 
Safe Bet said:
What would be your point?

PC Gamers deserve dedicated servers but Console Gamers don't?

I am sorry but it seems like everyone agreed dedicated servers were a huge positive until one console maker decided to offer them while another didn't.
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I have no idea who or what you are ranting about.

I was just curious if the dedicated servers that have been provided by EA, etc. for the last couple of generations were running on console hardware or not. I'd like to know and it has nothing to do with any arguments about whether dedicated servers are bad or good.

In fact, I'd love it if more publishers would provide dedicated servers for their games, and I think it's a shame that very few do on either console platform.
 
theBishop said:
There's only a handful of console games that let users host their own dedicated servers. Hence "fairlyunique".
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Doesn't -every- peer to peer MP game picks one of the parties as "host" in order to get the input from everybody and relay them to others? I must be missing something here.
 
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