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."

Comments

"Unused resources"?

[imsabbel]

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....

Re:"Unused resources"?

[segmond]

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.

Most people won't do it

[aussie_a]

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.

Unspoken subtext: 'cause they're overpowered

[MilenCent]

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...?

waste power

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Theres a need?

[Timesprout]

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

Not feasible

[eheien]

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.

It's not exactly a free resource.

[John_Booty]

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.

Re:To help who?

[Dr. Weird]

Two points:

(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.