Microsoft has been stress-testing its most powerful Azure node using a rather unusual method – by playing Tetris on it. Microsoft Azure’s CTO Mark Russinovich revealed the fun test via Twitter, alongside a short GIF.
“Achievement unlocked: playing Tetris on Task Manager on the Azure 24TB Mega Godzilla Beast VM,” Russinovich tweeted.
Of course, a normal game of Tetris is not nearly resource-intensive enough to be much use when stress-testing an Azure node. This particular game involved playing the activity level of 420 virtual Xeon processors in the Task Manager with each block representing a particular task being sent to one of the processors.
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An expensive game
This is not the first time that Task Manager has been utilized in an unusual way. Earlier this year, reports emerged that a similar visualization of CPU cores had been used to recreate the classic first-person shooter Doom on Windows Task Manager. However, subsequent reports have claimed that the game is a fake.
Going back to the Tetris video, assuming that it is genuine, it demonstrates that there are certainly some creative individuals working at Azure – or those with too much time on their hands. Either way, carrying out regular stress-tests is important, particularly given that unexpected outages can cause significant financial damage.
Given that this recreated version of Tetris probably cost a significant sum – it was effectively running on a supercomputer, after all – you are probably better off hunting down an old Game Boy if you want to get your classic video game fix. Still, the display was a pretty ingenious way of testing the latest Azure node, and given that there haven’t been any reports of disruption, it looks like it has passed.
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Via MSPoweruser
