National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT

Ever had a nightmare in which you've been pulling cable or fixing bug-infested user desktops for days on end? Then you can well imagine what Brad Wernicke goes through as network operations director for the Cyberathlete Professional League.

Wernicke lives that dream - not a nightmare for him - each time the CPL hosts one of its popular video game competitions. For seven non-stop days, Wernicke leads a team of 30 or so paid and volunteer workers in building and managing multiple LANs and fixing software quirks on untold numbers and types of user computers. The pace is grueling, but Wernicke doesn't mind. Working for the CPL brings together two of his lifelong passions - IT and video gaming.

This week, for example, finds Wernicke at the posh new Gaylord Texan in Grapevine, Texas, site of the CPL's Cyberathlete Extreme World Championship. The summer extravaganza draws hundreds of competitors, vying for tournament purses ranging from $25,000 to $100,000, and thousands of onlookers.

For an event such as this, Wernicke and his team typically get 48 hours to build five 100M bit/sec LANs - one for the competition, one for the thousands of attendees who want to play games while at the event, one for the CPL's sponsor vendors, another for the media and a final one for registration. At the Gaylord Texan, setting up the five LANs means running 100,000 feet of Ethernet cable over 105,000 square feet of exhibition space, installing Cisco and Netgear switches and access points (for wireless networking), and providing access to thousands of users.

On the 100M competition LAN, Wernicke hooks up CPL-provided user machines - battle stations, if you will. These are custom-built Intel Pentium 4-based computers running Windows XP Professional and outfitted with Nvidia video and ADI sound cards. Competitors can bring in their own mice and keyboards, but otherwise the systems are "even-steven," he says.

Wernicke doesn't allow Internet connectivity from this LAN, fearing for the network's stability. "If the network crashes, we've got to restart the match. That hasn't happened since I've been running the network," he says.

The second LAN, for the event's popular Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) area, presents a bigger challenge. Registered attendees can hook their computers into this LAN to play with other gamers or, in the case of those attendees who also are competing in the championship games, to practice and scrimmage between matches. "When the BYOC opens, we literally have 2,500 people at the door with their systems," Wernicke says. "And some of these people will play 24 hours a day."