Digital Ribbon Inc Conduct Largest Online Gaming Simulation Ever,

With the 6th fastest computer in the world, Digital Ribbon simulated over 120,000 concurrent users to stress test on Quazal online gaming platform.

"The project was a great success, thanks in part to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and Quazal" - Stated Erik Weaver CEO Digital Ribbon Inc.

"The customer came to us needing to stress test their online lobby scalability, to ensure it could handle the heavy load anticipated. The simulation was also very successful at identifying and improving the engines performance.

"It's a much greater challenge once the engine goes live to make changes, therefore pre-testing can be very productive." Henry Ryan COO Quazal Technologies.

The biggest challenges we faced were delivering short-term supercomputing power on a Windows platform. Our business model is similar to EC2 (Amazons on-demand computing) and Network.com (Sun's on-demand) we deliver supercomputing power on-demand with varying level of technical assistance in the process. In the past we have forced client to migrate to Linux, however the tools in the gaming industry are not readily available for Linux. Rewriting to code would have been to costly and time consuming. Placing Windows high performance tools has a unique market position.

We over came this with assistance from 6th fastest computer in the world (according to top500.org) and Microsoft HPC team, and are now glad to be the only true on-demand solution provider that offers Windows Supercomputing solutions. There are no Linux tools to do this kind of simulation at scale.

"Simulation is rapidly becoming an essential tool to increase productivity, and testing games is no exception," said Shawn Hansen, Director of HPC Marketing at Microsoft Corporation. "Historically, testing a game's ability to scale has been manual, difficult and time-consuming. With Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and .NET, Digital Ribbon was able to improve time-to-market by automating the testing of large-scale internet gaming."

During the project we seriously considered breaking the gaming engine simply to understand how much it could handle, with the 6th fastest computer in the world out could have easily scaled beyond 500,000+ users.

No one is believed to have ever simulated more than 5000 users before. Competitors generally test a game by handing out free copies or plugging a vast number of game consoles to the web and waiting for results and/or melt down -which does not produce good data.