Not strictly the sort of news we usually post but it appealed to my inner tech-geek. CCP Games have today shed light on their new Eve Online server, a 64 bit Opteron cluster based on IBM BladeCenter LS20 blade servers.

"The sharp growth rate of EVE Online was pushing the limits of the technology we replaced," said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games. "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. IBM provided us with optimized hardware that improved overall game performance and increased capacity, especially during peak server usage timeframes."

The EVE Online supercomputer cluster manages over 150 million database transactions per day on a 64-bit hardware architecture from IBM. The database servers don't use traditional hard drives but instead Solid State Disks (SSD) which are recognize as the worlds fastest storage devices with over 400,000 random I/Os per second. The recent world record of over 30,000 concurrent users on a single shard is a testament to the clusters capabilities and CCP is looking forward to support at least 50,000 concurrent users.

50K concurrent users on a single server, albeit a cluster, is rather a lot.