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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."
How about switching the thing off?
Its not that a game console is something like a desktop pc, running the whole day just to be quickly accessable....
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
And most people won't offer to have their console used for Seti or folding or whatever. Something that's needed more then horsepower, is the willingness to bother with it. And that will stop too many of these things from being overly popular.
It's great to help cure cancer, but not if it causes the number of polygons on Lara Croft's breasts to drop.
Also, will users have a choice concerning whether to so use their consoles' spare cycles, or will it happen without their concent or even overt knowledge? Will they be able to decide which project gets the use of their machine's time? And what if someone comes up with an entertainment use for those cycles...?
Sure,
the average consumer LOVES to waste power and bandwidth to search for aliens. Folding, Seti & others are good projects, but if Wired thinks the average console owner wants his console to suck power, bandwidth, and make huge fan noise while not doing something with it,they may be seriously mistaken.
I'm sure the same people that run Linux on their XBOX will run folding on their console, but not the majority of users, even if the console ships with that functionality.
I think someone has confused something they would like with an actual requirement. I can just see all the parents lining up to subscribe to this 'need' because they really want to use their jumped up electricity bills to help search for extratrestrial life signs
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Can you see Sony or Microsoft putting this onto their extremely important consoles? They have plenty of things that will make them money to worry about. It isn't even cool; it goes against the sleek silver hardware if anything.
All of the new console makers are going to be losing mega cash for each console sold, so why would they make any incentive for anyone to buy their consoles and use them as computers? The manufacturers lose money on the console and lose any possible revenue from game sales.
.01% of the uber-nerd population is insanity.
If the console manufacturers provide software that somehow taps the raw horsepower of the new consoles what would stop organizations, legal or not, from buying large quantities of game systems just to make a supercomputer for very cheap? Fuck that.
If I had not preordered my PS2 a year in advance I would have had to wait NINE months to be able to get one in the states. The demand for the new systems is going to be even greater. The last thing consumers need to hear is that there is a shortage of their favorite game system because Nerd University bought 10,000 systems for their new supercomputer project.
Shared computing is all fine and good for PC/Mac users, but honestly, for a manufacturer to open the floodgates of their OS to satisfy the wants of
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Since distributed computing projects crank your CPU to 100%, there's definitely an associated energy and environmental cost to running that stuff. This will become increasingly true in the future, with the increasing prevelence of technologies like Intel's "SpeedStep" or AMD's "Cool And Quiet" that allow CPU clockspeeds to dynamically vary the clockspeed and power consumption of a processor. That will only increase the difference in power consumption between a CPU at rest and a CPU that's pegged at 100% crunching SETI units.
Distributed computing advocates always seem to neglect this. They think that all those unused CPU cycles are a vast, untapped resource just waiting to accomplish fabulous things. Well, as a guy who used to have a few boxes crunching RC5-64 for Distributed.net, I can tell you that it's not a free resource when you're the one paying the electric bill.
Joe Consumer isn't necessarily going to think this technology is a great idea when he realizes that he's paying an extra $10 a month on his electricity bill for the "privilege" of crunching numbers for some dubious cause.
And, let's face it. Not all distributed projects are dubious, but many are. The fundamental problem is that a lot of compute-intensive projects simply aren't embarassingly parallel like SETI or RC5-64. And a lot of other parallelizable applications require access to huge datasets that make them unsuitable for distributed work. For example, 3D rendering can be parallelized pretty well... but the datasets are huge. For your CPU to render a single frame of Pixar's latest movie, it would need access to anywhere from hundreds of MB to several GB of texture and geometry data. A lot of scientific applications are similarly constrained.
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Well, of course the XBox is just a poor-performance PC clone at its heart. But the PS3 could quite possibly run circles around standard desktops. And even if it's not extraordinarily fast ... the offset is that there will be MILLIONS of them.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
What if some company would find a smart way to pay the users for the use of their CPU cycles?
Anything like what you described (or any compensation for your CPU cycles) is unlikely to ever happen. Reason? Most of the organizations asking for your CPU cycles are either too poor or too cheap to give you anything in return. They can't even afford to pay for the power usage that you incur, let alone put anything towards your hardware.
And for what it would cost to create and maintain a MMOG like what you're talking about, at least one people would be interested in playing, they could just buy an assload of computers (think $100 to $200 a pop barebones systems) and plug them in.
Not that it isn't a cool idea, just not feasible. You have to see the organizations asking you to run this software for what they really are...beggers. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, as long as you realize they will probably never have anything to offer you (other than the warm and fuzzy feeling of geekiness).
the article talks about distributed computing on large scale which is not very feasible for all the above mentioned reasons like
a) companies wouldn't spend money on building this into the console
b) most consumers cannot be bothered
There will be people who'd be interested though. I'd try it if I had a ps3... However with more and more use of clustered smaller machines in place of large supercomputers, clusters of consoles have been built in unis and research labs (for example here or here. There are a few advantages to using consoles:
a) they are cheaper
b) they are small form factor
c) they have hardware optimised for computation (at least ps2 does and ps3 will).
Sony had released linux on ps2 and word is they will be releasing linux for ps3 with extensions for the Cell's SPUs. Once ps3 has a fully featured OS any scientific app can be ported and modified to run on it. Now M$ on the other hand, well, I don't see them releasing any OS for XBOX 2*Pi but maybe the xbox linux crowd will take care of that.
I think the problem there is that cell phones are designed in such a way as to minimize the amount of energy used. If there was one place for a processor that didn't use power when it wasn't actually performing calculations, cell phones would be it.
So to make it happen, consumers would probably have to suffer with shorter battery life or larger batteries. Given how neat everyone thinks it is to have a cell phone which they can lose inside their own ears, I just don't see it happening.
Maybe something that only ran while the phone was on the charger, but fully powered. But at that point it doesn't seem worth the effort.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Ok, I stand corrected here. I have seen distributed computing come up where things were not going to be released back to the public though. Most universities, including the afore mentioned Stanford, are doing research with corporations who get to monopolize the results when something useful comes out of them (and taxpayers subsidize university research departments). Although this article doesn't indicate that one way or the other. It does give a link to the project but I don't really want my organic/bio-chemistry to come flashing back at me.
Point 2:
The company that I was talking about in Utah didn't patent a drug, they patented the gene! It just grants them an exclusive right to persue things related to that gene. They haven't come up with anything more than a test to see if one has the gene. They have used that patent to stop many other companies and universities from persuing drugs and gene therapies related to that gene (source: 60 Minutes). I can see granting the patent on the test, but not the gene! In my opinion that is just wrong.
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"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."
Now the Captain is wondering how many of us actually leave our consoles on when not in use? Show of hands... Now! Hmmm, not too many. Now how many of you would actually like to pay extra in electric bills to do it? Ouch. Even less. And finally, how many are going to mod their PS3 and actually downloard the app to make it happen? That leaves just about... Nobody.
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Apart from the fact that during gaming itself the Distributed Computing program should be (and probably will, as they do now) in the background doing nothing, and that they shouldn't run 100% but rather a bit lower when the console is idle, I could definitely see this happen if the game manufacturers give bonus levels, more bullets, stronger armour or whatever is good, nice and fun in a game. For the game manufacturers it will generate a ton of free publicity when their game helps curing cancer. The gamers get more fun. And if you don't want that, you turn it off. Now how hard is this?
Bert
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Do the "longer play sessions" of a game console continue through the night? This isn't the era of the NES, where 5-hour games didn't have a save feature *cough*Super Mario 3*cough* and players would leave the console on pause overnight. Besides, a TV can be used for only one thing at a time, and if it's not playing games through a console or playing DVDs through a console or other DVD player, it's either off, showing cable TV, or showing satellite TV.