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Distributed Computing on Next Gen Consoles
anonymous lion writes "Wired has a story on the need for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to support distributed computing with a non-gaming purpose. The article goes on to discuss SETI@home, distributed.net, and Folding@Home." From the article: "The next generation of console gaming is going to see a huge increase in machine performance and overall computing power. Already planned for both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are multiple 3.2-GHz PowerPC processors capable of handling advanced gaming and graphics simulations, along with out-of-the-box internet capabilities such as Xbox Live Silver. With all that horsepower in a machine that is used for only a fraction of a day, we should offer gamers a chance to put these unused resources to good use."
At least with current platforms architectures. The author seems to do plenty of research on current distributed computing projects, but does none on how the consoles perform.
I know that SETI@home has been ported and tested at least on the XBox, and it performs miserably. These console gaming systems are designed to play games, not do radio signal analysis or other scientific calculation. For example, there's little need for fast memory writing when you're mostly reading textures from RAM, but there's an extreme need when you do millions of in-place Fourier transforms. Unless Microsoft and Sony change their architectures for some inexplicable reason, I can't imagine future architectures would perform much better.
This article smacks of ignorance on the part of the author, who clearly did no research into the actual performance of consoles in regard to standard scientific computing.
really? and what components does your computer have outside of disk drives doesn't your television have? people turn on/off their TV tons of times a day, it's the same electronics component. Please!
Shed the myth! Hard disks for the most part are now better designed than back in the days, systems boot very fast, there is no need to keep your computer on if you will not be using it for a long time.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
A hint for you:
A 650W PSU doesnt draw 650W if its only under 100W load.
So my 350W enermaxx is perfectly happy drawing 50W when the pc is idle. Its efficiency may be lower, but thats not THAT huge of a difference.
AND PLEASE, learn your units. Saying "drawns more voltage then needed" really makes you look stupid.
If you put a hd, a 50W cpu, 512MB high speed ram and a GPU in a console, it doesnt magically NOT use that much less energy than in a PC.
And using DC on a console defeats to total purpose: using idle cycles, mostly on little used computers.
If you turn the computer on to run the DC client, you are doing something wrong (and if you BUY stuff to run DC clients, please die)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The Cell processor (PS3) is made for those applications. At the Power.org convention in Barcelona, IBM presented a programming example of large FFTs on Cell. It turned out, that large FFT calculations are about 100 times faster than on a Xeon 3.2 GHz processor.
Keep in mind, that this presentation was held in front of super computer professionals and its not that easy to trick them.