

Warcraft's Back End: 10 Data Centers, 75,000 Cores - 1SockChuck
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/11/25/wows-back-end-10-data-centers-75000-cores/

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tomkinstinch
That's a lot of cores. While the hardware and interconnects are certainly
different, a number for perspective:

The Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, currently the most
powerful supercomputer in the world, has 224,256 compute cores.
<http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/jaguar/>

If all of the WoW players woke up tomorrow and realized they didn't want to
play a silly game anymore, Blizzard could make one heck of a distributed
computing cluster.

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eswat
This post seems to interchange between referencing WoW and Blizzard's "gaming
operations" a few times. I assume gaming operations would include Battle.net.

Is the data here strictly about WoW? I'm just curious...

EDIT: The linked Gamasutra article clarified it. These stats are for WoW only.

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joshu
I can't imagine battle.net is very big anymore...

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byrneseyeview
Apparently WoW is now part of Battle.net:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle.net#World_of_Warcraft>

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slyn
Yes, they recently required that all accounts switch over to Battle.net (the
cutoff date was sometime early november, after a months notice).

The public reasoning about it is so users can use the same email/password
combination for WoW as well as the other upcoming Blizzard games like
Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and whatever their new IP next-gen MMO ends up
becoming. The private reasons one can only guess, but I would assume at least
that they can do stat tracking much easier with the new system.

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joshu
Out of curiosity, anyone know the peak # of simultaneous logins? I wonder as
to the user/core efficiency.

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endtime
<http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/realms.html>

Probably near a million. There are 200 realms in North America alone, and each
realm is capped at a few thousand players. If we assume that, at peak login
(say, the 24 hours after the last expansion pack was released) there were an
average of 2.5k people online per realm, that would be 500k in North America
alone...I believe I remember reading that 50% of WoW players are in China, and
there's also Europe, Russia, South America, etc. to consider.

From another angle, with 12m players worldwide, I think it's safe to assume
that at some point in the week after an expansion launches, 1 in 12 players is
online.

