Gadgetory

we sent a crew halfway around the globe to yon shopping Sweden why would we do that you might ask to take a look at the world's fastest internet connection a whopping 1.6 terabits per second at Dreamhack 2018 to put that kind of speed into context that is fast enough that everyone in st. John's Newfoundland could stream high-definition video at the same time and to download pub G at that full speed would take only 1/16 of a second they set this up in part to make sure that the over 6000 people connected to their network have a great gaming experience but also because of course londo bragging rights so let's have a look at the gear and setup involved and give a big shout-out to calm hem for sponsoring this video so how do you get 1.6 terabits per second you might think that you need a massive honking cable like the size of my face with all of the internet getting crammed through it but in reality it's way smaller and way smarter this tiny yellow cable right here is responsible for the whole shebang it's just a regular everyday fiber cable but within it there are eight different wavelengths of light each capable of 200 gigabit per second when the cable enters the transmission system here it is split off using a combination of passive ie mirrors and lenses and active signal manipulation to split the different wavelengths apart into more conventional signals these signals are carried through this larger wire which contains sixteen fibers and then they're split apart into individual fibers here from there the signal undergoes another splitting and is turned into 100 Gig purple fibers that then leave the transmission system supplied by the ISP calm hem and go over to dream hacks routers in here the signal is mirrored to allow monitoring and then it gets sent off to one of the 23 distribution switches around the floor now up until now the signal has been completely fiber but it has to be turned into a regular old copper connection for the final 20 feet or so so that happens here one gigabit is sent to each of the 260 access switches where individual gamers will plug in their computers and receive 100 megabit Internet that is unless their baller and shelled up for the premium package in that case their switch will get a 10 gig uplink and they will get provisioned a full one gigabit connection just for them finally those huge pop G updates can be downloaded quickly so this is all well and good so far fast internet who wouldn't want that but where it really gets crazy is in the department of redundancy department each distribution switch has two physical connections to the routers so someone could actually trip over one of the cables without anyone losing their internet connection at most they drop a packet or two and if the Dreamhack router that is going to all the switches fails gg no see the two routers on the ends here they are completely identical blo either one of them up and the game shall continue and it doesn't even stop there that 1.6 terabit wire it first travels to a data center in yon shopping where it gets split into two 800 gig fibers that separately travel to Stockholm so if you cut one of those wires you've got well 1.6 terabit because those data centers are also connected together so you would have to literally blow one of them up to drop this to a piddly 800 gigabit but of course all of those things could go wrong or someone could just cut the main cable here do it do it I dare you and even if that happened just 45 milliseconds later the routers will have failed over to the 410 gig fibre cables which also take two different routes to the main data center in Stockholm making it basically impossible to fully take the internet away from this land party alright so now we've got Internet into all the switches but every single one of the routers and switches needs to be configured and at this scale manually configurating each switch would take an eternity and even things you wouldn't normally think about like running out of IP addresses become big issues so to address this I'm sorry all of the switches are dynamically configured via an automated deployment system based on DHCP TFTP and Python so that is basically plug-and-play they're also using a monitoring software called prometheus so if a switch goes down they just know that one has stopped working they also know its physical location in the building and they're using a front-end called Griffin ax that creates graphs for tracking things like total hours played in each game what domains are used the most and the total network usage at any moment so we figured out how they solved the problem of getting Internet to the six thousand or so participants but every computer monitor and RGB strip has to be powered as well and all of those combined dry massive one megawatt or 1 million watts of power and the fancy stages that showcase the best gamers and musical performances will they gobble up another megawatt so some pretty serious gear has to be deployed to make sure that someone with a 79 80 XC or a thread ripper doesn't hit Cinebench and make the whole place go dark so 3 10 kilovolt lines come in and get transformed down to 400 volts and about 1500 amps then they enter this room right here or one of the other nine just like it from here it is split up into four hundred volt 400 amp lines that run to the various sub central distribution centers or 400 volt rails along the ceiling where it gets fed into a box that can handle 63 amps these power distribution boxes were actually custom-made for dreamhack and the older ones can handle two rows of landers while the new ones largely due to computers and especially monitors getting more energy efficient since the event started can handle three rows these are also secured with our CD so that if leaking current is detected let's say someone puts their finger in a socket or spills coke on a power bar the power is immediately cut to the group so no one gets hurt and a maximum of only 8 computers will go down but what happens if you aren't fortunate enough to make it to Sweden for the land but you still want to watch the eSports that are all going on at the same time that's where dream hacks very smart and also kind of jank completely custom broadcasting server comes into play so instead of running a traditional broadcasting server and mixer combination all of the video and audio streams go into a video hub a video mixer and several rendering servers that are behind me right now and then everything can be switched and configured over the network this allows for some really cool things like being able to switch inputs from basically anywhere so that they can be manipulated from the dedicated mixers here or by raspberry PI's placed wherever they're needed there's also an in-game observing team that has access to a delayed feed allowing them to show important moments from several angles instant replay style since they've built a custom solution using Casper CG they're able to do other cool integrations using data from the game engine as well so they can create graphics that show things like player health what weapon they're using or the timer on the bomb these additionally are hooked up to the stage setting so the lights screens and even the pyrotechnics like for when the bomb goes off are all automatically synced so it's been really cool to see all of the custom work that goes into making a massive event like this tick from the fastest internet connection in the world to smaller things like the ability to easily mute a host and I hope you guys have enjoyed it so huge thanks to you for watching and a massive shadow to calm hem before allowing us to be here to cover it so if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy this stuff attend Dreamhack in the future at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join