Ten Percent of China's Fastest Supercomputers Are Doing It For the Horde

Games are taking an increasing share of the world's entertainment muscle, eclipsing movie box office receipts, rivaling sports and putting the book industry to shame. In China, they're also taking a lion's share of the computing power.

According to the Register, experts have been puzzling over a list of the top-ranked supercomputers in China. The list starts off as one might expect. An oil company, the China Meteorological Administration and a supercomputing research center. The next five systems on the list, however, tell a dramatically different story.

Five of the top ten (and 12 of the top 100) supercomputers in China belong to none other than The9, a local game publisher best known for running the Chinese version of Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Although the supercomputers on the list only rank in the top 500 worldwide, The9 has at least five machines boasting clusters of more than 1950 cores and has at least 18,000 cores worth of processing power at its supercomputing disposal.

That means that 10 percent of the fastest computers in China are dedicated to serving up raids, PvP and phat lewtz. Despite all those cycles spent crunching stats, resolving battles and generally keeping a bevy of virtual worlds humming, even The9 has not escaped criticism from users over the bane of online gamers, network lag:

The9's servers has long been a source of frustration for Chinese WoW players," complains one local. "Many irate players refers to them dryly as 'Little Overlords,' a brand of cheap basic home computers (or 'learning machines' as they were advertised) popular in China in the 90's that were less powerful than Commodore 64s."

That same player ridicules The9's servers as being of "questionable quality" and the cause for massive amounts of downtime during peak playing hours.

In the real-world they say there's no such thing as being too thin. Apparently in the virtual world there's no such thing as being too fast.

[via The Register UK]