Eve Online sets gaming supercomputer cluster record

Company aiming for 50,000 online players on a single shard.

Company aiming for 50,000 online players on a single shard.

Massively multiplayer online game Eve Online has set a new record for the largest supercomputer cluster in the games industry.

The Eve Online server cluster manages over 150 million database transactions per day on a 64-bit hardware architecture from IBM.

The database servers use solid state disks instead of traditional hard drives to handle more than 400,000 random I/Os per second.

CCP Games, which created Eve Online, recently set a world record by hosting 30,000 concurrent users on a single server shard. The company now hopes to increase that to at least 50,000 users.

"The sharp growth rate of Eve Online was pushing the limits of the technology we replaced," said CCP Games chief executive Hilmar Veigar Pétursson.

"Our goal was to implement a scalable solution that could accommodate the influx of new subscribers and gracefully manage the steadily increasing demand put on our infrastructure."

The upgraded server cluster features dual-processor 64-bit AMD Opteron-based IBM BladeCenter LS20 blade servers, as well additional enhancements to the cluster's internet backbone.