World Math Day relies on high speed network from Dolphin
Expecting more than 1 million web users in 48 hour period
Dolphin ICS, a global provider of ultra low-latency, high-bandwidth computer interconnect solutions for application acceleration, today announced the successful implementation of Dolphin Express at 3PLearning, the company behind the global, web based math competition World Math Day. This is the largest Dolphin installation to date supporting a MySQL database application with very high demands on performance and availability.
World Math Day, inaugurated in 2007, was started with the ambition of uniting school students around the world to set world record in the number of math questions answered correctly in one 48 hour day. To support the event, the Live Mathletics Game of 3PLearning provided the perfect platform. March 4th 2009 will be the 3rd time World Math Day is conducted with the challenge of beating last year’s record of 189 million correct answers in 48 hours.
During the training in the month of February, more than 900 000 students between 5 and 18 years have registered from more than 150 countries solving a stunning 200 million math problems.
The technical infrastructure to support such a massive online event, has been selected and configured to provide the highest availability, scalability and performance possible. The World Math Day site is directed from load balancers in Sydney, Australia via distributed web servers all around the globe to the game site which is served out of the 3P Learning Data Centre in Chicago, USA. The World Math Day game engine itself has been completely redeveloped this year to run on a more scalable Linux platform.
Dolphin Express is a high performance low latency computer interconnect solution consisting of PCI Express adapter cards in each server, cabled in a 2 dimensional torus to route the small message traffic between the 50 servers in the game engine. 40 quad core CPU servers are running the application and 10 quad core CPU servers are running MySQL Cluster, the database which holds all the data of the game application.
The most important feature of the Dolphin Express solution utilized is the low latency characteristics of the network, providing the ultimate response time, and throughput performance for small message transfer in a MySQL Cluster. Also the dual level fail over capabilities of Dolphin Express which reroutes traffic past any failed server or network card is critical for the availability of the game during the game training and the game day of March 4th.
“We are proud to be part of this global event, both in supporting the contributions World Math Day makes to bring the world closer together as well as technologically providing a world class platform enabling the game to serve the vast number of participants and math problems, hopefully setting a new world record,” said Tim Miller, CEO of Dolphin ICS.
Watch or sign up for the game and be part of global history in the making by visiting
www.worldmathday.com!
About Dolphin Interconnect Solutions
Dolphin Interconnect Solutions of Oslo, Norway and Marlborough, Massachusetts (USA) accelerates applications by providing ultra low-latency, high-bandwidth computer interconnect solutions based on PCI Express. These products provide very low overhead communication, extremely low latencies and high throughput, all vital factors for communication that requires frequent transfer of small data packets and are ideal for clustered database, web services and many industrial applications. The Dolphin software library is fully transparent to applications making application integration easy. Dolphin’s PCI Express expansion products are fully compatible with off the shelf application software and device drivers. For more information, please visit
www.dolphinics.com.
