Vol. 4, No. 1, Summer 2009
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Faster Processing - Seconds not Minutes or Hours Over the past several months, we have gradually moved all of our simulations to a new processing system. The new system greatly increases both the reliability and speed of game processing. It shortens the time it takes to process each game from minutes to mere seconds. This will mean that games will have a faster turnaround time, especially during peak processing hours. The new system will allow “against peers” games to be processed in less than 1 minute. For larger scale games where hundreds of students are “playing against the computer”, the processing is reduced to under 10 minutes for all teams. Adding and Removing Teams in Active Games You no longer need to submit a replacement game if you realize that you need more team slots in an active "play against peers" game. Nor are you stuck with empty teams if students drop the class. Now you can add or delete teams after the game is activated, as long as the game is still in the first round and there are no students registered for the team(s) you wish to delete. It is the task of the Infrastructure group - Richard Mann, Zeb Stiles, and Jano Simicka - to make sure that all of our servers are operational and accessible from any location in the world. This year, they have made major improvements in our web server, database server, and DNS (domain name service) management. We can tell pretty quickly (within about 2-4 minutes) if our service is not up. We now have web and database servers in two distinct server clusters which are physically separated with different Internet providers. The clusters communicate constantly, sharing data and bringing us a 99.9% uptime. With this new system, outages will be even rarer, lasting no more than 30 minutes.
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