Feasibility of distributed computing across consoles over the internet *spawn

[Xenus]

Xenio you need to really work on your fundamental understanding of the concepts before you go spouting off that no one knows what they are talking about and that they aren't addressing your points.

Let's take an optomistic 100Megabit pipe. That is 12.5MB/s peak real listically it's nowhere close but for the sake of argument say it runs peak all the time. What you can do with that is stream from a datacenter\serverfarm doing the remote calaculation for you and streaming back answers as you stream input to it. What you can't do is is leverage every xbox in the world or some fraction there of to be calculationg data for you on anything much more advanced then a batch job system that is non deppendant like folding@home or numerous other such projects. The reasoning why should be abundantly obvious. 12.5MB/s is a paltry amount of bandwidth for moving data from one device to another in a one to one manner let alone for trying to interconnect multiple to hundreads or even thousand devices in a usable manner for computing. Basically the cost of moving the data and keeping the alll the jobs in sync far outweighs any computation benifits.

 

[Betanumerical]

thanks for the your answer
I think about two different situation,
the first is when a lot of consoles are always online and with game data inside the internal disk (but the whole disk can be hosted in the cloud)
and the second when the critical mass of always online console is not yet here

Both the situations could, maybe, be solved with a dynamic balancing between the console cloud, the servers and the local console;
things that need fast interactions with the player are best locally, in the near zone the servers and for distant places, the xbox cloud
A sort of LOD with fast interactive reactions zone rather Z distance
aside of this I see how well can perform on the geometry the xbox cloud, at the load of level the XC can provide with heavy tessellation, deformation, computed animations and so on, there're a lot of effects that don't depends so much on latency, such as water simulation, snow/rain simulation, and given 5-10 TF from server+xb-cloud, you can calculate new shadow maps (night/day or other cases), modify partially textures in almost realtime (maybe is possible to slowly feed the 5.5 GB with some assets from the cloud as you proceed in the level)

you know, this should be a new approach and a lot of problem will jump from new things, and there's some type of games that fits better just like open worlds games, or racing games too, or games based on turns as RPG where even 200 ms of latency is not a problem, and others that needs some deep thoughts and smarter approach as FPS, 3d platform and so on

Everything you have mentioned in this post requires more bandwidth then you have, remember you have only 30KB/frame of bandwidth in total, therefore if you want to distribute the rendering among N nodes you only have (30/N)KB/frame. This isn't enough for many graphics effects (any graphics effects?), the internet is also liable to drop packets, or to even have the packets arrive out of order/take different routes what do you do if this happens? you have to wait for the packet to be resent and arrive again, that is unacceptable latency.

The average person doesn't want to spend a couple hours downloading a 5.5GB texture to there game, intact I think consumers would be up in arms if you started hijacking there consoles without warning and started using there internet bandwidth without telling.

Dynamic balancing would make this even worse, it would require you to wait for even looking if a console drops out, as all that data needs to be resent to another node in the work to do the work again.

I have also not added the estimates for the time for the work be done in my latency estimates but for anything decent the amount of latency will not be low (probably 20ms+) so where now upto 120ms of lag, thats over 1/10th of a second nearly unplayable for FPS's

no one made claims. you've registrated when ps3 was near to launch, then you disappaired and came those days to populate this thread only to say "no this is not possible", and you ask for credentials?
for you curiosity I don't have experiences with console hardware but at least I work in IT, I've started to work with the turbo pascal, so a lot of time ago, and then, C, C++, PHP and so on, after that I'm a senior microsoft systemist with more than 10 years in big projects.
So ok I'm not mark rein, I'm not Gabe, I'm nothing, but now tell me who are you, came on, I'm waiting

You have been asserting since the start of the conversation that this is entirely possible and easy to do (whilst hand waving away the technical details) so yes you ARE making a claim, and you have still yet to provide concrete details for most of the problems, if you want to talk about bias why don't we talk about yours its clear you refuse to accept reality when it means that the Microsoft console is less powerful and instead decide that your going to push a ridiculous notion that multiple people have told you is not feasible yet.

Me? 3rd Year Computer Science, we actually get taught about networks and distributed computing these days.

 

[Sonic]

Xenio, do not tell other people they need to get more education when your use of the English language clearly isn't up to par with the majority of posters on this forum.

And this is an idea I'm unable to get behind. It makes little sense to me to use other people's machines to do distributed computing when using a centralized server is a far simpler and superior method. I would prefer all the computing done locally and not have some weird pseudo updates of computaiton come from the cloud. That could absolutely ruin immersion in the game and the gameplay itself.

 

[Xenio]

Shifty aside, those board are full of warriors with the personal attack approach, instead to talk about topic, you prefers to trash and derail the thread

Xenio, do not tell other people they need to get more education when your use of the English language clearly isn't up to par with the majority of posters on this forum.

thanks, soon I will go to work in london, hope that my english will improve, you'll be happy then.

why don't we talk about yours its clear you refuse to accept reality when it means that the Microsoft console is less powerful and instead decide that your going to push a ridiculous notion that multiple people have told you is not feasible yet.

Me? 3rd Year Computer Science, we actually get taught about networks and distributed computing these days.

ok now I'm impressed. No, I'm not. You don't have even a degree, maybe you're a 21 yo with zero working experience and you came ti point your finger at me? now this is ridiculous.
No matter how many times I will repeat you to forget the per frame arguments, you'll continue with your "30 KB/s bla bla" no matter what, without listen, again and again, with copy and paste. You have simply ignored what wrote by me and Shifty.

Xenio you need to

you too have completly missed what's wrote about balancing between local, server and console cloud.


Hardly microsoft will go with cloud computing, but if they will, I'll like to see disappear all those "it's impossible" users from the board, forever

 

[Betanumerical]

Shifty aside, those board are full of warriors with the personal attack approach, instead to talk about topic, you prefers to trash and derail the thread



thanks, soon I will go to work in london, hope that my english will improve, you'll be happy then.



ok now I'm impressed. No, I'm not. You don't have even a degree, maybe you're a 21 yo with zero working experience and you came ti point your finger at me? now this is ridiculous.
No matter how many times I will repeat you to forget the per frame arguments, you'll continue with your "30 KB/s bla bla" no matter what, without listen, again and again, with copy and paste. You have simply ignored what wrote by me and Shifty.



you too have completly missed what's wrote about balancing between local, server and console cloud.


Hardly microsoft will go with cloud computing, but if they will, I'll like to see disappear all those "it's impossible" users from the board, forever

You still haven't actually provided any evidence to anyone you just keep shouting in the loudest possible voice thats its possible because you say so, you need to prove your claims.

Heres a list of logical fallacies you have committed so far.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof

So if you could stop demanding evidence from us, stop attacking other people as uneducated, if you could stop moving the goalposts of your argument, and if you could stop thinking something is true because you wish it to.

That'd be great and we could get back to the actual conversation.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That'd be great and we could get back to the actual conversation.

There never was a conversation. Someone suggested an idea without much reasoned backing that other had an emotional reaction to and the 'discussion' was just about posting styles and how stupid and wrong everyone is. Sometimes that happens in technical threads when someone without understanding contributes noise, but this discussion never even started.

An actual discussion would involve someone breaking down the requirements and looking at what possible solutions there are or aren't, concluding whether it is or isn't possible. If someone's arguments fail to deal with something with a logic that can be tested with reason, the better thing to do is just ignore them. Conversations take two parties, and someone posting nonsense in your opinion will disappear if no-one responds to them.

So everyone, either debate sensibly or ignore each other! I think we all too easily forget that there's an ignore option in our account settings.

If I had more time I'd create a starter post to explore the issues. There are some aspects of DC that could be used, although I consider the general concept as far too impractical to ever materialise in the next-gen of consoles, or even ever, depending on what inter-device communication technologies we invent. But what this discussion really needs is people to actually take the time to express their ideas, instead of short reference and vague notions. Xenio should start again with a clear explanation of what he thinks is possible (not vague 'maybe we get 5 TF computing' but 'taking this game style, these jobs are not time critical and could be shared'), which would give a basis to ongoing debate about the issues that could stop that happening (such as data limits, latency, yada yada).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The level of discussion here is appalling, fuelled in considerable part to poor language skills in reading and writing by both sides and an underlying conflict of personalities.

I'm going to strip and rebuild the thread, and remind everyone that this is the Beyond3D technical forum, where the discussion is the tech, not the people and how stupid they are.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Ack! I thought this was the Server rendering thread, not distributed rendering thread. Cleanup, aisles 6, 7 and 8!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Now that we know that the answer to feasibility is YES,

No, it's not. You were talking about networked consoles sharing resources. MS using servers is a different infrastructure. I'll move the corresponding discussion accordingly.

 

[Flux]

could work but with limitations

Network computing for gaming consoles are impossible right now.
Games running on a cloud is possible and is the future of gaming.
You cannot do this right now. There is too much overhead with bandwidth and latency. Imo 3-4 frames of video/input lag is unplayable.

The only way to do this is to create another non-internet based connection to the cloud.

Like a far range Ethernet.

Latency and bandwidth requirements are the biggest problems.

 

[hesido]

Both the situations could, maybe, be solved with a dynamic balancing between the console cloud, the servers and the local console;
things that need fast interactions with the player are best locally, in the near zone the servers and for distant places, the xbox cloud
A sort of LOD with fast interactive reactions zone rather Z distance
aside of this I see how well can perform on the geometry the xbox cloud, at the load of level the XC can provide with heavy tessellation, deformation, computed animations and so on, there're a lot of effects that don't depends so much on latency, such as water simulation, snow/rain simulation, and given 5-10 TF from server+xb-cloud, you can calculate new shadow maps (night/day or other cases), modify partially textures in almost realtime (maybe is possible to slowly feed the 5.5 GB with some assets from the cloud as you proceed in the level)

All these hard work and effort, load balancing between console cloud, servers and the local console, syncing information between all entities involved, accounting for variable latencies, switched on / off consoles, packet losses...

For what?

How many more nuclear reactors do we need more so a 12 year old kid can gaze upon industrial level crash simulation on Forza 8? (I'm assuming there'll be some time before this incredible tech matures )

I have nothing against 12 year old gamers. But I think they should better run their games on their end. Which, IMHO, could still be fun.