OGRank - EVE Online Hardware Upgrades

On the 1st of November the EVE Online Traquillity cluster will receive more computing power and fast disk space. Maybe the CCP goal to have their cluster enter the world top 500 supercomputers chart is still ongoing?

Yes, it's time for more of that. The first upgrade is on the 1st of November as you might know already, we're adding more internet backbones, both to add more capacity but also to offer you multiple routes to access Tranquility (called multi-homing). The EVE cluster doesn't use that much bandwidth though, however we need low latency so we always aim for low utilization to allow for that.

Absolutely. Another ultra-cool RAMSAN is coming in too. This will allow us to move more tables in our SQL server over to the RAMSAN and have more headroom in case we need move some of the new stuff over there in Kali. These things are so fast that we can't even max out it's data throughput.

Of course there is more. 5 new IBM LS21 dual-processing AMD Opteron blades are coming. That's 10 more nodes to the 102 we already have. But no siree, that's not all. You see, this is just the latest batch being installed on Tranquility on November 1st. There's still more coming.

Yeah, how can we stop when we're having so much fun? We can't. We're bringing in 28 more blades. Yes, that's 56 nodes. Plus the 10. Plus the 102 already there. Do the math, that's 168 nodes of uber-cool yaardware! IBM is sending them to us as fast as they can. They know what's at stake here. You. We hope to have them in mid November. Then we'll release Kali.

Yes, Tuesday we started public testing of Kali on Singularity. Note that Singularity doesn't have the capacity to host all the players helping out to test, we had more hardware coming to reinforce Singularity, but that has to wait, because we rerouted that hardware to Tranquility. We hope you understand.

But it's all good though. We're getting very good feedback on Singularity, we're fixing at lightning speeds, about 100 fixes daily submitted and tested which might seem a lot - and very little to others. The fact is, we have hundreds of thousands of lines of code and having it tested properly is very important to us. We won't catch all the bugs, but we think you get the scale of the effort going on right now at the office.

Kali contains a lot of improvements, fixes and optimizations that are too big to deploy in the Tranquility codebase, the changes are simply touching too many systems. So Kali isn't just "new stuff", it's a lot of fixes. A whole parking lot of fixes. A parking lot the size of Iceland of fixes. And Iceland is bigger than ... oh, never mind.

We also have a team working on hotfixes on Tranquility, which was one of the reasons we postponed the Kali public testing. We simply had a lot of good fixes we needed to test so we could deploy it to Tranquility. Most important of those is probably the fix which addresses solar systems which have a lot of Starbases.

We deployed that Tuesday and we're now looking at other areas to improve in Kali based on the stress tests on Singularity. Large gangs for example, the update to all gang members of changes in damage states is really heavy. We have other leads too, but please help us out during the weekend to stress test this specifically.

To sum this up, we're fixing, we're optimizing, we're bringing in more hardware and we're working on Kali. We should also have a quote.