2 page Case Study - Posted 11/18/2008

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CCP Games

Leading Game Publisher Selects Windows HPC Server to Scale to One Million Players

CCP, the publisher of the massively multiplayer game EVE Online supports 300,000 players—and a peak concurrency record of more than 40,000 simultaneous players—in a single environment. But as it anticipates continued growth in EVE, and even larger audiences for upcoming projects, it’s turning to Windows® HPC Server 2008 to improve performance, enable scaling out to more computers, and facilitate easier management of a supercomputing environment.

Business Needs

This is a universe with intense combat, with mega-corporations and crime syndicates. It’s a world in which your goal is to become a major mover and shaker, trusted by your friends and respected by your enemies.

Welcome to the world of EVE Online, a massively multiplayer game published by CCP. EVE is unique in the world of online games because its 300,000 subscribers—with more than 40,000 online at any one time—can all interact with each other in a single universe. In contrast, most game publishers have addressed the challenge of supporting the extraordinary compute power and low latency needed for massively multiplayer games by “sharding:” creating separate copies of virtual worlds, each on a different computer, with each participant playing in only one of those copies. Sharding reduces the resources that a game publisher needs for each world, thus making the game more scalable. But participants can only interact with players in their limited copy of the game; they cannot interact with all subscribers across the entire universe.

When CCP was creating EVE in 2002, and needed to support a single, massively multiplayer game with thousands of concurrent users, it chose a highly unusual and visionary solution for the time: a custom high-performance cluster solution on Windows® 2000 Server, the then-current version of the Windows Server® operating system. Clustering enabled CCP to build a decentralized solution in which a central or “head node” computer parcels out portions of large computing tasks to many other computers, or “compute nodes,” for simultaneous processing.

That was fine when EVE had 3,000 concurrent users. But as the number of such users soared toward today’s 40,000, and as the company anticipated growth to 100,000 concurrent users, it needed a more scalable, more reliable clustering solution to continue to provide users with the performance and low-latency they’d come to expect.

Solution

Eight years before, CCP had faced the question of how to build a high-performance cluster. The company had rejected a popular choice for clustering—Linux—in favor of the Windows Server operating environment because Windows Server offered a rapid application development, better deployment tools, faster deployment, and better service and support.

We’re basically talking about changing the wheels on a racecar while it’s speeding around the track, rather than waiting for a pit stop. Windows HPC Server will help us to do that. Jon-Carlos Mayes IT Director, CCP Games

The company plans to migrate to Windows HPC Server from its current Windows Server 2003 environment in what James Wyld, Virtual World Project Leader, CCP Games, calls “a series of small, seamless steps,” rather than having to implement a major rip-and-replace. The application and proxy layers of the game will remain unchanged. The company currently runs EVE on 10 proxy servers, through which players around the world connect to the game.

Behind the proxy servers is the application layer, which runs processing and simulations. This layer currently runs on 100 two-processor computers, or nodes, for a total of 200 processing cores. These nodes connect to what Wyld calls “the heart and soul” of EVE, the 1.5 terabyte Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 database, with 40,000 input/output operations per second. With the move to Windows HPC Server, CCP expects to be able to immediately increase the number of nodes by 40 percent, to 280.

In place of the set of Java Scripts that manage the nodes under the existing system, CCP will manage its new, expanded cluster through the Microsoft HPC Management Console, which monitors the status of each processor in the cluster in real time, with a highly visual heat map providing at-a-glance status of CPU loads and network traffic. CCP will be able to assign and reassign proxy and application servers as needed, and to push out compute node images to bare-metal machines from the head node.

Benefits

“Just like so many large enterprises today, we’re looking at high-performance computing to give us the performance and scale that we need to meet challenging technical difficulties,” says Gabe Mahoney, Vice President, Engineering, CCP Games. “It is no different than large-scale computing at any other forward-looking company.”

Which is why CCP chose Windows HPC Server. “With Windows HPC Server, we get great support, knowledgeable people working on our problems for us, and it allows us to offload the infrastructural challenges of scalability and performance onto a trusted vendor, so we can focus on providing the best, most innovative and imaginative game possible,” he adds.

CCP anticipates not only being able to scale out to more computers, but also to speed the performance of its existing hardware, and to give players even lower latency—that is, faster, more seamless gameplay—than they enjoy now. Part of that greater performance comes from the technical enhancements in Windows HPC Server, and part of it comes from faster and easier management, which gives CCP the ability to add and alter computers on-the-fly, reducing the service window during which CCP brings the game offline for maintenance.

“We’re basically talking about changing the wheels on a racecar while it’s speeding around the track, rather than waiting for a pit stop,” says Jon-Carlos Mayes, IT Director, CCP Games. “Windows HPC Server will help us to do that. It will enable us to manage a massive, dynamic infrastructure very simply from one console, pretty much out of the box.”

Windows HPC Server will also give CCP a supercomputing infrastructure that it can use as a template for future games. For CCP’s upcoming projects, the company anticipates an even greater population of players than the population playing EVE.

“That’s where Windows HPC Server comes in,” says Halldór Fannar, Chief Technical Officer. “We foresee a significantly larger cluster, so the management needs to be better. People say it can’t be done—we’re saying that’s where we’re headed.”