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Playstation 2 Linux Cluster at NCSA
Mr. Spock writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is looking at scientific computing on the Sony Playstation 2. They've set up a cluster with 65 compute nodes. They're running Linux for Playstation 2. What will they think of next?"
Beowulf cluster of Playstation 2's... Oh wait! They did, nevermind.
More info on the processing power of the PS2 as applied to computational chemistry.
Basically, this study shows the PS2 has roughly the computational linear algebra power of a PIII-600 (the then fastest processor on the market).
Imagine a cluster of...
Oh.
imagine two thirds of the comments mentioning a beowulf cluster of something!
oh wait..
This seems like a fairly expensive way to make a cluster. $200 for each PS2 and $200 for each Linux kit? That comes out to $26,000. You could buy computers with more RAM and faster processors (than a 400MHz MIPS) for about the same amount.
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
Install Windows 2003 Server on a few p166's and cluster 'em so can they actually boot up ;)
But really.. im sure a good ol' pentium 166 will do better clustered then Playstations.. this seems like they are running out of things to research ;x
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
What do we have left to imagine _now_?
Hopefully this won't be too offtopic:
Anyone know where to buy/download PS2 linux without buying another HDD/network adapter?
Those of us with the HDD & Network adapters would love to know...
Or do we have to buy a special HDD to get this to work?
I'd love to show all the X-Box modders that the PS2 can still be just as useful.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
If so, this could be a great DMCA test case, since NCSA is a respectable organization, and would present a much more sympathetic case in court. Even if they don't go after NCSA, others could use it as an example.
XBox modders, for instance, claiming substantial non-infringing uses could point to the NCSA PS2 cluster as an example.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
This reminds me of the news story about Iraq buying 3000 PS2's (for missiles?). Regardless, the chips inside these are indeed quick!
I just hope someone gets on the RC5 train with these...
Colossians 2:8
the nodes started competing with each other and yelling "w00t w00t". In the end no work got done.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Cluster fuck. Happy now?
When you don't have a leg to stand on, don't even get up.
Looks like cash strapped science labs all around the world may soon be rolling in CPU cycles on a failover cluster built of Kids game consoles and Linux, and the heavy duty workstation manufacturers will see their stock slip even further.
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
This reminds me of an episode of one of the cartoons I read. Written by a Nuclear Engineering PhD at Berkeley, the strip is quite funny. Here is the one this reminds me of.
There's no sig like SIGSEG
What will they think of next?
Probably clusters of just about any cheap all-identical hardware. It seems to suit the concept of clustering well. Sony have already done all the marketing and hardware price cutting to get the machines out there and used, while subsidising that cost with the games they sell. They'll only get cheaper. On top of that, they're identical systems that'll stay pretty much the same for the next 2-3 years. Good for spares in the future when three of your boxes have worn out, and the pet rat belonging to professor sieslak upstairs has pissed in two.
Sounds good to me!
Perhaps they got this idea from Slashdot. Then it's easy to predict what they will do with their cluster. They will render a picture of Natali Portman, naked and petrified.
1. What are the performance stats of the cluster in the
2. Why would you bother when you could use current commodity hardware for much less? I mean, a P3-600 is interesting, but you could probably drop some Duron 1.4s with a basic mobo and 256MB RAM for less out the door than a PS2. (Note: I'm only asking, please clarify if you have a better idea of what's going on).
Apparantly this runs on Sony's own version of Linux
See more about it here: http://playstation2-linux.com/
Maybe an XBox port in the future? :)
Are PS2s more cost effective than other competitors? eg cheap x86 linux boxes.
Surely Walmart PCs must give more bang for the buck, but are PS2s going to be more stable? What do you guys think??
Arc
I Highly doubt they paid a dime for any of it... I'm sure they told Sony what they wanted todo and Sony said "Hmm, 65 PS2's and you'll make a cluster out of them and we'll get good press? Sure, where would you like the pallet delivered..."
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I think what he wants is really "clusterfuck" without the whitespace. Here ya go:
Clusterfuck clusterfuck clusterfuck Clusterfuck clusterfuck clusterfuck Clusterfuck clusterfuck clusterfuck CLUSTERFUCK !!
PS2 cluXtarFux0rz y00, be0tCh !!
and... drum roll... how about a beowulf CLUSTERFUCK of these !!
and btw You Misspelled Ludacris.
!!
What will they think of next?
I'm still waiting for a cluster of PDAs running Linux.
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
This means that the cheapness of stable platforms can not compete with innovative platforms.
The real question is whether the administration and maintentance benefits of a homogenous and stable platform outweigh the higher cost of processing power.
I suspect that we will see a step function between rapidly and smoothly improving Dell boxes and occassional huge leaps on game platforms.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Internally, we've experimented with large clusters of GameCubes to handle applications such as online games where various game entities in the universe can be logically decomposed into discrete units and processes running on each node of the cluster. This provides a more natural and robust organization to the traditinal setup of a few massive servers, since if one server crashes, it may bring down large parts of the game universe. In our setup, if a node fails, it might affect one NPC at worst, which another node will take over in due time.
While our investigation has targetted the needs of games in mind, I'm excited about using them for sheer computation, since the cost/MIPS of a game console is far less than traditional mainframe, supercomputing, or even PC platforms, and we are in preliminary talks with some large Japanese universities to experiment with using the GameCube as a compute unit.
While I must admit I'm sort of biased :-), we believe that our GameCube makes a superior clustering platform compared to the PS2, computationally (higher CPU speed), physically (its smaller size and form factor, less heat dissapation) and financially (lower unit cost).
Our future game consoles will likely support clustering "out of the box", with expansion as easy as hooking them together, allowing games, such as FPSes, or AI-heavy games like the Sim* series, to seamlessly evolve with the greater "virtual" CPU and memory resources that a cluster provides.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
A Xbox is cheaper than the PS2 (An Xbox is about $150, according to OSDN Pricewatch), comes with twice the amount of memory, ethernet, and instead of buying a $200 Linux kit, you pick up a flashable, legal* mod chip for $25-$50. How the Emotion Engine compares to the Xbox P733 I have no idea, but I can't imagine the EE is that much faster.
:)
Both The Xbox-Linux Project and Gentoox can provide you with a distro. For free.
Even if you're not planning a cluster, this is a good deal for a low-performance work station, or just a "media box", using Xbox Media Player, which plays most (all?) popular media formats, both music and video.
It's been repeated countles times that Microsoft are losing money on the console itself, and depend on the games to cover their expenses. Therefore, paying up for a Xbox and giving your money to MS isn't immoral as long as you don't buy any games.
See, it's a win-win situation
* I lost track of the current situation in the U.S., but in the free world (Read: Europe) at least the chips not using MS code is legal.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
A lot of the GDC and SIGGRAPH 2003 papers focus not on graphics directly, but on scientific computations using the CPU. It's very cool, and if nVidia and ATI the like ever want to expand into a new market, they should build cards with multiple GPUs each, and sell them to the scientific community, or to non-realtime CG places like Pixar to accelerate their offline rendering.
This page has a good summary of the current research going on to make GPUs do stuff other than graphics. http://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~harrism/gpgpu/index.shtml
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The hardware costs are negligible whether NCSA paid for the units or not. I doubt Sony paid the salaries of the people working on this -- and this is where the real money is spent. I'm all for people working on projects like this even if it's for no better reason than to see if it can be done. But when my tax dollars are involved, and we are in an economic downturn, and the nation and many states are facing huge budget deficits, my hacker ethic gives way to my pissed-off-taxpayer ethic.
Really, there is no tangible scientific benefit to doing this, so I don't know why they bothered. The only leg they have to stand on is if they argued they were trying to see if a terrorist-friendly nation could build a supercomputer out of toys, but we know this is true already so I still don't like it. If they wan't to play around, they can do it on somebody elses dime... not mine.
Please excuse my ignorance on the CF word. I think I kinda know what it means. I think a cluster hire is a CF if you understand all the implications of it. But what really is a CF? Is it what my parents used to call (derisively) a "three-ring circus"? Is there a rigorous definition, etymology, or example usage? I want to call something a CF and use the term correctly.
After all, everyone knows that console hardware is sold for a fairly significant loss, all the profit is in the licensing of titles. One on its own isn't much to sneeze at, but a cluser of 64? You get a fairly powerful cluster and Sony subsidizes your super-computer. Smart idea...
Nukees strip on clustered PS2's.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
[snip!]
Samir Gupta, Ph.D
Head, New Technology Research Department
Nintendo Co Ltd. Kyoto, Japan
What I want to know is, how much resume spam do you get, now that you post on slashdot, saying(or perhaps claiming) you work for Nintendo's R&D? :-)
Please help metamoderate.
Happy memorial day: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_fuck
Why not fork?
Port a BSD for God's sake. Or strike a deal with qnx or something. Maybe even "Inferno" from Plan 9. If not, just stop posting to slashdot! We don't need your stinkin hardware if Nintendo is gonna cross her legs and refuse to let GameCube cherry be popped!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
It just occurred to me how many asses might read /. and think it applies to them. No! GameCube's code is sealed tighter than a drum- dooming it to obsolescence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
maybe some smart person (s) could get their head (s) together and find a way to make all 200 million playstations ever made work on some crazy problem like random mathmatical numbers occuring in natural rainfall. Another good projuect is to see if all that power might reverse the earth electric field. It would be interesting. Also here is to 1seconddelay getting slashdotted. I am he and i am here and nobody stops me. love 1seconddelay.
Reminds me of a nut case I met at a garage sale some 10 years ago. He was scavenging ZX80 Timex Sinclair in a effort to prove that clustered computing built around very cheap systems was the wave of the future.
I also complained about how he had been an EE for IBM who was not appreciated for his genius. He was very worried that once he released his ZX80 FrankenCluster, IBM would steal it from him due to his old employment contract.
Lee Joramo
I've seen it over and over. General purpose hardware being used for specialised tasks. Yes it works ok and it's cheap, but so what? Video card GPUs can do this too, but you've only got on AGP slot. Refine it and go faster.
What do you need? How about rack full of Custom PCBs each with a GF-FX or similar, with some RAM and a PCI-X backplane. The host can run a regular fast cpu and provide the interface. I'm sure Nvidia would jump at the chance to power a supercomputer with their chips.
Not a chance. Playstation 2 linux is designed for the MIPS architecture; the Xbox has a good old-fashioned x86 under the hood.
Also, Sony's linux distribution for the PS2 is based on a 2.2.1 kernel (old old old!), XFree 3.3.6 (again, quite old), gcc 2.95 (somewhat out of date, though plenty of systems still use it). The FAQ here says that the software is only slightly more recent than the software included with Redhat 6.2.
In short, there's nothing worth porting when you can get all of the Debian goodness for so much less work. I personally don't know why I'd want to shell out that kind of money for some second-rate hardware and a profoundly old linux distro with the price of commodity hardware being as low as it is these days.
Or were you just kidding?
At least not on the internet.
Nein for google.
One EXTREMELY LAME hit from deja. Surprisingly, the sig is identical.
Until you show some credentials (as in a link to nintendo's site, with a page with AT LEAST your name on it), you don't exist.
In fact, it appears your department doesn't exist.
Heck, where's your thesis, at least?
I find it neat, though, that you went from being Head of New Technology Research at SEGA straight to being Head of New Technology Research at Nintendo. More amazing, though, is that both companies have exactly the same departments!
More interesting:
<sgupta@research.sega.jp>:
Sorry, I couldn't find any host named research.sega.jp. (#5.1.2)
Look, provide me a page at nintendo.co.jp with your name on it, and everything will be sorted out.
Otherwise, this is:
Bill Gates,
Microsoft Founder
Redmond
Signing off.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
For one, it would be fun to know. Secondly, we know the name of the guy to blame everytime we see that lame joke.
Maybe we will feel better if we can spam the original joker every time we see a beowulf joke.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
One day people are going to realize that the fact that something computes does not mean you have to put Linux on it. That day the combined brain power released will result in a cure for pretty much everything you can think of.
talk about useless hardware... with intel hardware being dirt cheap, the labs where i work have about 25 dec alphas running at 100mhz with 32 megs of ram. for fun, we're clustering these with linux. it should be fun
I write code.
I do remember the story that started it. There was a post almost a year ago on someone building a beowulf cluster of Apple IIe's (yes I am too lazy to search for it {/. search engn. sux}).
Every hardware story that came out after it contained at least one comment about.. "Man Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of X". I guess the idea was that a cluster of Apple IIe's was so absurd, why not a cluster of Microwaves (with microprocessors) or a cluster of iPaq's (it exists) or a cluster of ______ fill in the blank.
65 nodes and it's still got jaggies!!
I Highly doubt they paid a dime for any of it... I'm sure they told Sony what they wanted todo and Sony said "Hmm, 65 PS2's and you'll make a cluster out of them and we'll get good press? Sure, where would you like the pallet delivered..."
Nope, completely wrong. Not trying to drop names here, but I know some of the people that were closely involved in the project. None of it was free, and it was done completely without documentation from Sony.But of course, you still got a +5, informative. Nice job, mods.
You know, the AC is right on this one. The only Linux you can get for PS2 is a Japanese version, which does suck for non-Japanese. You have to use a strange keyboard.
--I dunno, maybe it was just the weird feeling I got after discovering that all these PS2's are running ancient Kernel *2.2.1*... Couldn't they at least have upgraded to the last 2.2 kernel rev?
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I speak and read a little japanese, but it's not needed to use the US PS2 kit -- it's in english.
Also you can even get a debain distrobution for it now. Stop talking about things you never seen or even read about. =)
http://blackrhino.xrhino.com/
Not trying to drop names here, but I know tarzan1.
Perhaps Sony encouraged this setup to learn clustering techniques utilizing every inch of their hardware for the upcoming PS3 "cell" boxen? They're under pressure to release the console before its original time (2005-6 now 2004?), so maybe they're squeezing performance out any way they can. I seem to remember there being rumblings of distributed computing, could this benefit that? Regardless, I'm sure they're watching closely.
:)
Just a thought. I'm not an engineer so please don't bother flaming if its not a realistic idea
A bare bones Pentium 3 or Athlon box doesn't cost that much more than a PS2 and runs at maybe 1.5 ghz. I think it can do an SSE2 operation (like a 4 point MAC) in 2 cycles, or is it 1 cycle? Since the clock speed is 5x the PS2, the overall throughput should be at least as fast and maybe a lot faster.
I'm still waiting for the GBA rendering farm...
<insert geatse humor here>
no one will laugh
I would have thought you could avoid the need for the HDD etc. if you could boot a miniaml linux distro off an 8MB memory card, and use the CPU power of the EE along with NAS for data storage.
Is this possible?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Why not use the iLink porton the PS2s instead of the linux kit Ethernet card and get 400Mbs instead of 100Mbs
"he's full of get up and go" "really?, he fills me with lie down and die."
I've been wanting to get the Linux for PS2 package for a while now. But, the main reason I would want to, as I have a number of Linux boxes already, is to have Linux running on a shcweet HDTV I'm looking to buy. But, the Linux kit for PS2 only does sync on green and I don't know if regular/hdtvs usually do sync on green or sync on rgb. I'm loth to spend the $200 if the only way to run it is with a computer monitor...
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Some people might need to use SSL while connecting to the playstation2-linux site, or you'll get a blank page:
https://playstation2-linux.com
Massive XBox cluster, subsidized by Microsoft
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
The "imagine a Beuwulf cluster of this" is quite a bit older than a year. The first case I found after a short amount of Googling was WYSE uses Linux for thin clients from 99-06-14. I'm sure even earlier can be found, but it was getting a bit old (har har) to look through search results. I bet you could do it quickly if you made a script for it though. (For quite a while the URL contain the date, so you'd only have to track that.)
;-)
Could even do it to build a "Beowulf cluster of these" database.
the gscube? sounds like what they wanted, plus a ton smaller. see it here
I want 2D games back.
As of today on pricewatch one could purchase a complete duron 1.3 ghz system (no os) for $211. This is a very sweet price-point @ 6.16MHz/dollar. I'm sure they could do even better purchasing in bulk (probably opting for a non-End Of Life chip).
Iraq did this in the summer of 2000 - they were using the PS2 (on pre-order, IIRC) and its graphics engine for -surprise!- missile guidance and telemetry.
Old news. New company. Same story, really.
You know that would probably have got modded up +5 funny if you had spelled Natalie Portman's name correctly.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
The newest ati's and nvidia's seem to have 256 MB of video ram which is 4x that of the ps2's complete ram. The speed of this ram is close to 10x faster then pc 2700 (currently the mainstream ddr333) as Nvidia indicates their ram moves 27 gig's of data per second. Also the new intel sprindale or whatever chipsets support 800 mhz fsb and dual channel ddr400. Compared to the ddr 266's availble then this is almost a 3x increase in overal system memory bandwidth... coupled with agp 8x we have at least 3x to 4x more memory band compared to the geforce3 era.
Hmmm... Pie...
No, the point is that sending data from the video card to main memory is extremely slow. The video bandwidth is fast, as is the bandwidth TO the video card, but the bandwidth FROM the video card to main memory is almost non-existant, this is true even for AGP 8X as it is an extremely asymetric bus. From what I remember the bandwidth from the card to main memory on AGP 4X is actually slower than PCI 32bit 33Mhz.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You just need the Boot CD that comes with the Linux Kit, and maybe a memory card for each PS2. Then you can boot each of the CD (one at a time), and they can run, mounting the root partition over NFS, fine until the next re-boot.
I wonder if the divx video or Vorbis audio encoders could be ported to the PS2. They are heavy number crunching, cpu hungry programs. Oggenc runs faster than real time on a fast pc, but nowhere near as fast as a fast CD ripping drive. I don't think divx can run in real time even on the fastest pc's. A cluster of ps2's may be a cheap way to do a lot of cd-to-vorbis ripping or DVD to divx conversions in a hurry!
Well then Tarzan353, educate us. Obviously your in the know and we're not.
So, how was this funded? Was type of research are they doing on this cluster? Was this an academic endeavor? How is this pushing forward understanding of vector based HPC? Are they going to give their findings back to Sony?
The reason I voiced my "opinion" of the situation was because of the experiences I've had dealing with companies.
Most of my friends (and several of my co-workers) cut their teeth writing drivers for hardware that was donated to them by the manufactuers. They'd call up the company and expain they were a student and that they wanted to write a driver for [x] device. Voila, 5 would show up in the mail including all kinds of developer documentation and pin out diagrams.
Hence why I thought that they probably gave Sony a call and said "We want to build a cluster of these and we'll share any knowledge we get while doing it" and Sony said "That sounds like a great investment and sent them all the stuff". To me it seemed logical. Everybody wins. Since Sony's next generation playstation is supposed todo all kinds of clustering it only makes sense that they have some understanding of any short comings that might be found in the current generation of hardware so they don't carry those mistake over to the PS3. So, if some entity with shitloads of experience in clustering is willing to just come along and do it for free (as in no cost to Sony) I would think they'd get the cost of 65 PS2's back in R&D savings X fold.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
What they're doing is using the vector processor parts of Emotion Engine, which is the graphics processor chip, as a number-cruncher, but not actually using it to drive the graphics functions. And they're using the CPU to do I/O and networking and feed stuff to the Emotion Engine.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks