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Distributed Computing on Next Gen Consoles

Posted by Zonk on from the working-for-the-man dept.

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."

3 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Most people won't do it by aussie_a · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. waste power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Not feasible by eheien · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.