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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."
If such a system would allow me to get credit for the work my PS3 does for these corporations, and if I could use said credit to buy downloads, then I can see how this could be a very attractive proposition for gamers and corporations.
I was just talking to someone (in the ECE dept) who had bought a slew of these things for numerical computation last weekend. Its the cell part which apparantly acts as (i think) 128 SIMD processors .. which if you have code that parallelizes well gives you crazy numbers. At this time all he's managed to do is get Linux running and he knows the compiler works.. The math is 32 bit so I am not sure if/how it bleeds over to real numerical work.. Anyway, Its not sony who should be exploiting this, its IBM. IBM knows how to write compilers and IBM knows a lot about scientific/high performance computing. IBM does not know how to sell things cheaply :) However if they can sell these things to Sony for a profit, surely they can figure out how to sell these at a proper price point to poor scientists, who otherwise put PS3s on their grants :)