Sean Shypula and Luis Villegas: Life on the Bungie Farm: Fun Things to do with 180 Servers

Posted By: Dan Fernandez | Mar 20th, 2008 @ 9:17 AM | 9,317 Views | 1 Comment
Sean Shypula and Luis Villegas are developers for Bungie (makers of Halo) that build the distributed asset processing system, a 180+ server farm that is used to take massive tasks, break them into pieces and process them in parallel.

To give you an example of why this is needed, one of the tasks, Lightmap rendering, a technique used to pre-comput lighting/shadows to a Halo map before the map is loaded (to improve load times) can take over 24 hours across 100 machines!

The server farm itself is programmable in that you can write C# code to handle any distributed task.

You can see the slides from their talk at GDC here and here's a link to a video that was shown at the end of the talk!
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#Apr 1st, 2008 @ 12:02 PM
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