Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
What do we have left to imagine _now_?
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?
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? :)
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.
A source close to Government Intelligence services in the UK said: "This is complete cobblers. For a start, the suggestion that there's a shortage of standard PC hardware in Iraq is silly. PCs are commodities like cars and washing machines, and they can get as many PIII and P4 PCs as they like, sanctions or no sanctions".
I feel I should make a WMD joke here...but I won't.
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.
I feel I should make a WMD joke here...but I won't.
Windows of Mass Destruction
there
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.
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...
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
IIRC (I own the kit, btw)
Sony put everything they themselves created on the first disc. Their bootloader, PS2 technical documentation (covered by a NDA), and thier software development libraries.
Basically the Linux packages are on the second disc.
Bork Bork Bork!!
65 nodes and it's still got jaggies!!
How else do you propose that people run arbitrary scientific programs on the PS2? Right now Linux is the only solution, nobody saying it's the end-all be-all of computing.
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
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.