Does SL Run on Blue Gene????!!!

I already posted something like this in the Off-topic forum, but since it realted to SL i thought that it was entirly approprate.

Someone implied in the, "What computer system for SL" thread that SL was running on blue gene, or that at least was the minium that it took for SL to run smoothly on maxium settings

If this is not the case, what are the minium FLOPS and HERTZ (and bandwidth requirments) that SL needs to run smoothly on maximum settings

When SL is run on Blue Gene the computer's name has to be changed to Gray Gene.

are you serious or pulling my leg?

if the lindens could tell me that would be really helpful

do you not know what blue gene is?

rax,
secondlife is unique amongst games in that it uses all of the following very intensely: cpu, gpu, bandwidth, ram.

other games usually just need a decent cpu and a kickass vcard because they are streamlined for smooth performance by a coordinated art team. sl needs everything because the environment is made without coordination between the creators.

CPU
your computer is always using 100% cpu. for this reason it is important to have as fast of a cpu as you can afford. ideally a hyperthreaded cpu is what you want. when you are single tasking on SL, you can turn hyperthreading (HT) off and use your full cpu for SL. when you want to multi task, you turn on the HT so that only half your cpu is used for SL and it will give you good responsiveness when switching applications.

GPU
it really is worth it to get a radeon 9800 or higher. in nvidia that would be 6000 series or up. you will get to use shiney, shadows, funky water, and hi rez on avs. you can even turn on antialiasing on your video card to get really smooth lines (minimal pixelation)

Bandwidth
get the fastest connection you can afford. this increases the speed that places load after teleport.

RAM
more ram allows you to increase your draw distance for greater immersion. you need good settings for all the other items too.

I'm running on a P4 3.4, Radeon x850, 1 GB RAM, and a 4 megabit connection. sometimes sl is slow to load on teleport, but once it's loaded its very smooth. i keep a 128 to 256 m draw distance, with shiney, lights, shadows, and all the other doo dads.

I think there's no such (end-user available) computer yet in the world that can run SL smoothly with even moderately good settings. Maybe in 5-10 years.

where the hell do you live. a four gigabit connection here is meant as a buisness connection, if you have one of those here you are either very lucky or very well-to-do

well is there an esitmate on what it will take has anybody heard of the CELL that sony is developing? and are you accounting for moores law

Yes. I'm just making fun of your excessive punctuation in the thread title.

~Ulrika~

Nah, just a feeling, and interpolating.

I started SL about 1.5 - 2 years ago, with a bit aging, but still nice machine (I thought). SL was SLOOOOW on it, but if i took the settings down, it was kinda okay.

Then I bought a new machine (mainly because of SL , hoping that it would run better. Well... It DID run better... but i still had to limit options.

Then I bought a new video card, an NVidia, which is at least 2-3x faster than my old one, and I could put on still more settings, features.

My ADSL went from 384kbit (back then) to 1 Mbit, that also meant a positive change.

Overall, I think my computer and video performance has got more than 5-10x better, my network 3-4x, but I'm still seeing about okay to relatively low framerates (15-20 fps mostly, sometimes worse, like 6-10 fps), with moderate graphic settings.

But you're right, maybe when we have 2 or more so 4 processors (or cores) in a machine, that might help. If one processor is doing the geometry rendering, the other managing physics, or the UI, network, all the other things... That might help. A bit.

I've heard of the CELL. According to NewScientist, a single CELL chip will be capable of processing data at 256 billion floating point operations per second (ooo), making it roughly an order of magnitude faster than today's pentium 4 chips (ohh baby). It's designed from scratch to deliver cinema-quality graphics and stream multiple video channels- enabling you to watch one while recording a handful of others at the same time (ohh, yeah, you're the best). Whereas today's single processor chips quickly build up bottlenecks because they are designed to retrieve just one piece of data at a time from memory, CELL can make 128 memory requests in one go. The PlayStation 3 is 35 times more powerful than its predecessor, and clocks in at 1% as powerful as the human brain. This puts it at supercomputer status compared to ten years ago, and indictates that PlayStation5 will probably equal the 20 million billion per second computational capability of the human brain.

Ahhhh...that was good

That had to do with the gray loading textures I see all around surrounding the Impeach George Bush textures. Oops, I didn't mean to say around the Impeach George Bush signs, I meant to say the scenery in Second Life. I get the two phrases confused since they are almost the same in meaning.

I know exactly one person who records video on their PC and zero people who watch much more video than web ads and funny clips they get in the mail.
If you want to watch "video" maybe you should get a television?
It's pointless to worry about end-user computing power, since 99% of people don't need much more than MS Office and the internet (web/IM/email).
I would sooner back someone making a resilient, low-power embedded web appliance than a souped-up multiprocessing monster designed to handle an unrealistic amount of concurrent video streams. Not that the cell is much more than hype anyway.

UHH it isn't 256 billion, it is 256 million, 256 gigaFLOPS not teraFLOPS, Blue Gene runs at 256 billion FLOPS

At present, SL is far more server bound than client bound. Although that may change in the mythical SL2 which is mythically under development; no schedules or intentions have been announced.

There are design limitations (the centralized asset server) which have not scaled nearly as well as the gridded sims do. Perhaps they could throw some IBM big iron at the problem (mini-computers still excel in I/O and database operations, that's why they are made and bought) but to the best of my understanding, the asset server is still MySQL running on a presumably high-end micro.

The performance was great when there were 40 sims and an online census of a couple hundred.

hey sorry about that. i meant 4 megabit connection.

Huh, the asset server is apache, running on some fancy optimized filesystem... XFS I believe.

Are you quite sure? There are a few things that lead me to believe that your screengrab is of a debug port for the asset server:

1. the name you show asset.dmz.lindenlab.com is typically used for devices outside the firewall (dmz)
   
2. I get no response from that server, not even a HTTP 404 error (or any http respnse or any ping response, nor any http session establishment)
   
3. During a normal SL session, once the login authentication is performed, there is no HTTP, or even TCP traffic between here and there
   
4. You were (are?) an independent developer for LL and may have been given special access to debug tools
   
5. using HTTP as a transport for something as non-textual as the asset data would be sort of foolish
   

I don't mind being wrong, but I would prefer not to be incorrectly wrong. Please let me know if I've missed something.

Ok. Well I consulted my cyberhipocampus (oh, alright, I did some browsing on technology sites) and so far all have confirmed that 256 gigaflops= billion floaing point operations, not million. Still, it is true that you can't trust all information on the Net. Perhaps they are all wrong?

"Cyberhippocampus"? (With an extra "E" added by me.) That sounds like a wonderful place for online education in Second Life!