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Sony To Expand Commercial Uses of PS3
Sony is considering proposals from commercial distributed computing concerns, mulling over rolling out more Folding@Home-like clients to their PlayStation 3 consoles. Gamasutra reports on a Financial Times article, discussing the future of the system. Because they would be commercial and not charitable organizations, the company is considering some form of compensation for users who would participate. "Sony Computer Entertainment CTO Masa Chatani indicated in an interview that Sony had already received numerous inquiries. 'A start-up or a pharmaceutical company that lacks a super-computer could utilize this kind of infrastructure. We are discussing various options with companies and exploring commercial applications', he said."
They seem to like to ignore the fact that it costs money to run the console. Anyone that has bought their own car understands that it costs money not only for the Gas to make it run (electricity for the console), but there's maintenance as well. The car needs new tires, brakes, and other parts that are in use. The console is not designed to run at 100% CPU 24/7 and will wear out quicker.
I would guess you could wear out a PS3 in a year by running it 24/7 on this, so that's $600/yr cost right there. I seriously doubt they plan to pay that much.
Even assuming the console would last forever, the electricity to run constantly it is apparently about $150/yr. http://ps3.ign.com/articles/776/776347p1.html This charts says the national average to run Folding@PS3 is $12.23/month, which is about $150/yr.
I don't think that they would even pay the $150 in straight cost you incur, let alone for the wear and tear on the console.
This is a great opportunity to contribute to a cause, but it's an awful idea as a way to make money in your home.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Pretty easy to calculate. A PS3 uses about 180W when it's folding. Assuming electricity costs $0.11/kW/h, it costs $14.25 per month to run it 24/7.
Not sure about the 128 SIMDs. The PS3's cell processor has 7 so-called SPUs (Synergistic Processor Units), basically coprocessors that work on a 256k separate internal storage. If your code is embarassingly parallel, you can greatly benefit from this architecture.
r y/pa-linuxps3-1/index.html?ca=drs-
The hard-coded floating point unit is single-precision indeed, and doesn't implement the full IEEE floating point spec, which raises eyebrows in the scientific double-precision junky crowd. The individual registers are 128-bit, although they are organized as 4 32-bit words.
Here is a nice little intro to the beast: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/libra
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/