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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'm fed up with the idea that sharing is caring. I don't like to share. I don't want anyone using my bandwidth, my CPU-cycles, my harddrive or my bathroom. It's not that I don't have a high bandwidth connection or several idle CPU's laying around, it's just that I don't like the idea of giving when all I want is recieving (i.e. torrent) I say we put an end to this hippiecomu P2P and other distributed services once and for all.
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
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
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.
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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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).
(1) All of the distributed applications that you mention release the results of their research as public scientific publications. Any companies can use the results, but so can anyone else. Subscription to the journals is all that costs money, but generally free "e-prints" are available. All of the distributed applications that you mention are non-profit.
(2) Even if they were patenting the results (which they aren't -- see 1) it is better to have the patented result that one has to pay for than to have nothing. If I have breast cancer, I would rather pay $1000 for a test than be unable to get a test because no company wanted to invest in it.
As a side rant (somewhat related to (2)), you say patents are inhibiting progress. But without the financial incentive that the breast cancer patent generated, the medicine would never have been developed. I'm sorry that so many people only work out of greed, but that's reality at the moment. And it actually works pretty well.
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.
"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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