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Eight PS3 'Supercomputer' Ponders Gravity Waves
Jamie found a story about a inexpensive supercomputer being used by an astrophysicist to research gravity waves. The interesting bit is that the system is built using 8 PS3s. Since nobody is actually playing games on the system, it makes sense to use them for research projects like this, but I really wonder now what is defining 'Supercomputer'... I mean, a hundred PS3s sure, but 8? I think we are de-valuing the meaning of the word 'super' :)
Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. PS3 having "no games?" Thanks for posting that to get people riled up, CmdrTaco. Just because a console is ahead of its time doesn't mean that you should post such asinine summaries.
It would've been cheaper to just buy a Cray.
*ducks*
64 cpu's. That seems supercomputerish enough for me.
cat sig >
I believe that people were clustering PS2 for research shortly after the release of the linux kit...cheap processing power is cheap processing power.
Noone has wished for a Beowulf cluster of these yet. Has the world order changed and no notification issued?
Just over a decade ago the fastest computers in the world were barely breaking the teraflop mark, today in theory the XB0x and Ps3 with their multitude of cpu cores and finely tuned graphics cards can top that. So 8 Ps3's - if you believe sony's hype could clock in a >10teraflops if the hardware was well utilised.
I had a freiend who wrote a book 'Nemesis' which was a spy thriller involving a killer asteroid - it was published in the UK 1998, and back then he was talking about 'the teraflop box' as being the fastest computer in the world, unfortunaly it took 8 years to get the book released in the US and by that time a lot of the computer jargon had dated significantly, and you could get a teraflop box in the form of a turbocharged graphics card or cutting edge games console.
Super is a relative term, what was a super computer is now a computer that I hand-me-downed to my mom so she could check her email and browse the web.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
Now we know who bought all the PS3s!
Well the guy used to use a 200-node parallel supercomputer, but now he prefers to use 8 PS3s. That to me proves that 8 PS3s is like a supercomputer TO HIM.
I'm sure there are faster setups available if had the money, but 100% of 8 PS3s indefinitely is preferable, from what he says, to the costly little slices of "real" supercomputers he tried to rent before.
I wonder if Sony could offer a "HPC PSP3" which provided a stripped down processor board without the shiny case, graphics memory etc. It would be interesting if the Cell processor could get better economies of scale.
Ouch!
You haven't read the Sony press releases about how powerful the PS3 cell processor is.
Mod this response as flamebait. Beyond folding@home, this is a great use of the potential of these systems.
The only problem is that the results will be on Sony Memory Stick and no one will be able to read them.
Let's add the supercomputer possibilities to those blurry and widely underused (or doomed to become underused) features such as DVR, blu ray, backward compatibility and computer likeness. Oh wait... grid computing was already done. Nevermind, they will surely find something else to add to the PS3 soup.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Didn't Sony try to claim one single PS3 was a "supercomputer" in the run-up to launch?
---Vote None of the Above---
Is it simply FlOps? Then at some point, every computer will be a super computer unless you scale the amount of operations with the speed of computers
Is it the 'classical' image of a huge room of boxes chugging away? Then as individual computers get faster and smaller, these rooms will be filled with more computing power as time goes on.
What about parallel processors? The PS3 has some form of parallel processing capability as I understand, so linking eight together isn't just 8 parallel processes it's 8*(parallel processes in one PS3)
Since some 'super' computers of ages past have less power than some modern desktops, I think that the first is more likely if you scale the threshold of a 'super' computer, e.g. the fastest 1-2% of computers out there. More generally, I think that most people conveice of a super computer being any computer system that can perform tasks that would take an unreasonable amount of time on a single, off-the-shelf machine.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
Sony's taking a loss on the console and expects to make it up when someone buys software. For every researcher that buys a PS3, Sony loses a lot of money, since that person won't buy software to help Sony make up the difference.
Research: helping to bankrupt SCE.
It's a supacomputa!
I think that having multiple game consoles hooked up in a way to do mass amounts of scientific computations is very super, think about, those consoles are designed to crank out so much mathematical data for graphics and game terrain simulation that all output to the gamer flawlessly! Heck I would cluster xbox's if the memory wasn't so small and other problems (talking of the first xbox not the 360), I wouldn't touch a PS3 if I wasn't gonna slap some Linux on it and run it as a computer.
To see a few of my Android apps goto: www.hartwired.com
In a data center, the PS3 would be acceptable. I just can't imagine anyone making a rack mount enclosure for the PS3. :)
rm -rf
But I bet it still does not run Vista.
Maybe his research grant doesn't stretch as far as heating the office. Win-win situation in that case.
threadeds blog
> Since nobody is actually playing games on the system
You can always count on Slashdot for a fair and balanced presentation of information.
Funny that I've bought 4 disc-based games and at least one downloadable game since the beginning of July, and have been using my PS3 almost exclusively for gaming since then. I'll be buying at least 4 more games before the end of the year, too.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the PS3 game drought has been over for a while now...
I'd like to know more details about his code, because a PS3 only has 256MB of RAM. That's a serious performance obstacle, since most high performance applications that do anything interesting need much more than that. I know it's a problem our group has had, and we've heard the same from others.
The teraflop won't be usable for general computing (not even close) but if you add up all the little floating point units on the chip you'll get a teraflop.
No sig today...
I can't think of anything clever to say other than the subject, though...
He's the sort of man who is always on the take
Sells for nearly a score, what cost pennies to make
He'll invite you to his home, and then charge you for tea
Then charge you for the toilet when you have to go pee
He's a Rip-off Robert, he's a Rip-off Robert
Rip-off Robert, sells over-priced DVDs!
My old xbox is now a media centre, so why not use a set of consoles for data crunching. It's all just math and these things are optimized for it.
You people DO realize that when they say "nobody is going to be playing games on the system", they DON'T mean all PS3's in general, but are referring to the fact that these PARTICULAR systems are going to be used for science. Look at the context: it's saying that the government is reluctant to give out grants for "game" systems, regardless of the potential uses.
How about we all stop flying off the handle at what we suspect may possibly be a cheap shot, and actually READ the article for once (oh, right, this is Slashdot, never mind).
Captcha: overdone (how appropriate...)
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
GP was FUNNY, not flamebait.
It met the government's definition of super computer at the time. (1.5Gflops ... well, technically, 1500MTOPS).
The designation is part of the "Dual-Use" restrictions on exports (basically, things which could be used for both military and non-military applications).
The 1Gflop threshold was set as the necessary processing power to calculate balistic trajectories for missile systems.
I can't find the documentation, but my understanding is that the current threshold is 190Gflop (since Jan 2002).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The CPU power of the PS3 is indeed very impressive, however, for most real-world supercomputing tasks the 256 MB RAM per node are way too low. One Gig per core should be the minimum, meaning you would have to increase the amount of RAM in the PS3 by a factor of 24.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
i think he means nobody is playing games on this particular system (of 8 ps3's) not that nobody plays games on the ps3 in general.
how can so many people have misinterpreted that?
#include <sig.h>
When do i get the cell on a standard ATX form factor with an open BIOS for personla Linux home use?
Any plans for that?
Are you saying he's an xbot or a wiitard?
Disclaimer: I hate the PS3 (though I love the cell, but not for gaming, because that's too complicated for most game programmers to handle). I love my XBox 360 and Wii (as long as they both continue to function and don't break).
Since nobody is actually playing games on the system, it makes sense to use them for research projects like this
Yes, because ~4 million people count as "nobody". But seriously, am I the only one that's tired of troll article summaries around here? It's either a flippant comment like that, or some asinine, leading question at the end, like "Could [people who are professionals and therefore have a clue unlike submitter who only skimmed the article in question] finally be getting it right?"
Slashdot is where i go for excellent commentary - I've tried reading comments on sites like digg or reddit, and neither can compete with whatever strange and wonderful force it is that guarantees at least some highly-moderated comments on this site are really worth reading (often moreso than the article, which is probably why no one reads it anyways). But now that we have firehose, etc, I say we should start punishing stories early for this kind of trolling, tag them as such, and maybe even put up some prepublication commentary on it. I've only submitted a few articles, but I know that, despite popular belief, the editors *do* edit what is written, and maybe, just maybe, we can reduce this annoyance.
Of course I know there are many more important problems in the world than the submitter being an ass, but this is one I can do something about - and so can you.
I think Sony's failure, among other things, was due to dropping PS2 compatibility. I mean, why buy a PS2 slim when you can buy a PS3 for twice the price? No, thrice... wait... four times - no, make that five...
OK. Make that backwards compatibility, AND the price... AND the wiimote.
the ability to leap over tall buildings in a single bound is what it took.... ...now that's super, man
Also, I am curious, is there some boundary that delimits super vs not? I mean, the term super is always relative to what is common, but where does on place such an arbitrary boundary.
Hmmm, perhaps because it is NOT clearly stated. Hell, your "interpretation" could just as easily be wrong.
If 8 PS3s is a Super Computer, then 64 PS3s is a Super Computer II and 4,096 PS3s is a Super Computer III?
/. interface update really SuperSucks IV)
(PS - the latest
Yeah, but in this case it's not /. doing the PS3 bashing, it's the actual article from Wired instead, just look at the first sentence
/. isn't the only PS3 hating news source out there eh :P
"Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony's PlayStation 3 isn't exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block."
Looks like
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Looking at this page:
http://www.answers.com/topic/supercomputer?cat=biz-fin
they define a 'supercomputer' as being "A mainframe computer that is among the largest, fastest, or most powerful of those available at a given time". This is suitably vague, since the point of reference changes all the time. On the other hand there is no point of reference in the definition. For example, does it have to be in the top 100 or 100x more powerful than the current top of the line PC? Without a suitable reference point anyone could call their cluster amongst, the "largest, fastest or most powerful".
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
That is 50 to 500 teraflops in 2007. Everything else is a "last generation" supercomputer and marketing noise. My cell phone is as fast and has as much memory as a 1970s Cray supercomputer (60 MFlops).
I remember being annoyed by the big hoopla surrounding the (year and a half late) release of Intel's 64-bit processor. After all, DEC had a 64-bit Alpha processor for years (until Compaq shut down production), and the Nintendo 64 had been out for something like two years. Game consoles were using multiple cores running multiple threads each in a 64-bit environment for years before Intel or even AMD got around doing it, and they're still doing it better than either one.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Question: why do you read Slashdot.
8 PS3s gives you 1.2 teraflops of single-precision performance or a similar number if you stick to integer operations (6 SPUs/PS3 gives ~150 GFlops). 1.2 teraflops is a supercomputer in my book.
:)
Using Jack Dongerra's single-precision algorithms that do half the work in single and the other half in double precision, you can maintain a high level of performance and precision. And, the unique architecture of the Cell opens up some interesting algorithmic research issues, allowing scientists to publish twice for the same work: once for the science results, once for the computer science results.
On the flip side, the Gigabit ethernet on the PS3s isn't really 1GB - the PPU can barely keep up. So, extra care must be taken around communication points. And, a similar Intel/AMD-based rack would run about $20k and is much easier to develop for, so if your labor is expensive (i.e., you're not in academia), PS3 clusters may not make much sense.
-Chris
And that's why flop performance is usually reported for a very specific matrix opperation. The other one is called the theoretical speed and nobody cares about it.
There may be games out on the system -- and I'm a huge fan of PSN, easily the most appealing feature of the system right now, with a much more interesting selection than XBLA -- but it seems fair to say that nobody's playing it. There are all of two PS3 games in the top 20 on this week's estimated games sales charts (yes, US only), and they're 16th and 20th. Last week there were also only two games in the top 20, both ports of NBA titles that did less than half what the 360 versions did. Weekly hardware sales at this point are still running behind the PS2, nevermind the other next-gen consoles. There may still be hope on the horizon, but saying that people aren't buying PS3s or PS3 games in any real volume is still a matter of fact more than it is an opinion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFoyp71xw3w
Well, I don't know what qualifies as a supercomputer nowadays
But, to some of us, any computer made in the last decade at one point would have qualified as a supercomputer. I seem to recall any machine which had > 1GHz of CPU speed used to be classified as munitions grade equipment and illegal for export. Something to do with being able to design the Trident missile or some such.
I remember machines being in the low-two digit MHz machines were considered to be big honking machines. I remember PC magazine in the very early 90's saying that nobody but the most power hungry corporate servers would ever require the (then new) 486-DX266 machines which screamed along at 66MHz. Heck, I remember machines in the single-digit MHz range being all the rage (4.77 MHz without turbo, which came later). The machine I first coded on had 16K of RAM -- that KILO bytes.
Sigh. It never ceases to amaze me that computers have gotten 3-4 orders of magnitude bigger in all respects in just around 20 years. Boy, do I feel old now.
Young whipper-snappers -- get off my lawn!
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm having trouble comprehending what eight of them would do running intensive math calculations.
Moe: This thing can flash fry a buffalo in 30 seconds.
Blank until
8 games? Yikes, either you play *everything* or you've got some real crud in there. Care to elaborate? (I hope one of them isn't Lair ;) )
To give an idea, the top 8 games on PS3 get metacritic scores of 85 or more ( http://www.metacritic.com/games/ps3/scores/ ). Only one of those is over 90.
To compare, the 360 has *27* games at 85 or more ( http://www.metacritic.com/games/xbox360/scores/ ) 9 of which rate 90 or more.
For me, of those 8 games I'd be interested in 4, 2 of which are also available on PC.
I'm glad you're enjoying your PS3 for gaming (hell, competition is what keeps things improving) but the general sentiment is the PS3 needs a killer app (like a halo, gears of war, or some other really good exclusive title) to make it worth getting.
how many ps3s would it take to make it onto the top500 list?
lose != loose
I wonder if the US governments' restrictions on exporting super computers covers game consoles as well. If it does the Xbox 360 is most certainly restricted.
(not that it is really a super computer, but if you have ever had to deal with said restrictions you know that 10 year old desktops are considered supercomputers by the US gov)
I do work web site administration for a non-profit organization and it's amazing how much we'll bend backwards to accommodate the views of our sponsors. If a sponsor gives us money, we'll be sure to remove a reference to another organization, just to appease them.
Since Microsoft buys lots of ad space across many Internet sites, including this one, it's no surprise that many of these sites will put an anti-Sony spin on their "news".
These sites will call the 40GB PS3 "gimped", while calling the 360 Arcade "a deal", as well as other hypocritical bs.
When your income depends on advertising money, you'll do whatever it takes to appease your sponsors.
2005 article, a company called Mercury created 7U dual cell servers. 2.8TFLOP, they claim a 6ft rack will pack over 16TFLOP of processing power.
When you can commonly buy dual or quad core 4 proc machines and can scale a couple of those together. No, 8 gamey boxes "scaled" are not a super computer, unless you are comparing that to a C64!
If I was deep this is would be profound, if smart then wise, if a poet then verse. Here it is, you judge!
Nope. It is far too unaerodynamic to reach such speeds without a prohibitive amount of initial energy. Certainly not unassisted.
Is it more powerful than a locomotive?
While it concumes about the same amount of raw fuel, it produces far too little in the way of mechanical enregy to pull even a single model RR caboose. Amtrak found this out to their chagrin.
Is it able to leap tall buildings with a single bound?
While it does acheive a much heralded TeraFLOP, it turns out that that word does not actually mean "hitting the Earth" as a casual guess at its derivation might assume. So, in a nutshell, no jumping, buildings or otherwise, without significant assistance.
Finally, does it fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way?
The ultimate in guileless parroting, it will simply display whatever it is told, and will never consider the veracity of the content before micrying it. Justice is a bit trickier in that there is little about Justice that is agreed upon. Once GTA IV comes out however, there will no longer be any support for the notion of it supporting even justice with a little "j." As for the American Way... Well it does favor style over substance with an arrogant belief taht it will be Bought because it is Made. Which is about as close to the American Way these days as anything else. call it one out of three.
So, no, I would have to say that it would not qualify, in any quantity, as a "Super-Computer."
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Well I know I'm not supposed to RTFA (damn noob), but it states that the ps3 machines were given to the guy after he asked Sony for them. So the GP seems perfectly spot on - the "nobody plays games on the ps3 in general" part is only in the Slashdot presentation, and there's some similar bashing in the article's intro...
If they just built a box with say, four NV G80 based computational engines (128 stream processors per card with thousands of threads per procesor) and used CUDA, even that would have been more impressive.
The cell processor dose not have 6 cores. However, it does have 6 SPE, that are capable of self-multitasking. It was originally designed to bridge the gap between conventional desktop processors and some of the elements of specialized high-performance processors such as GPU. The architect allows it to handle multimedia and mathematical calculation without having any problems. It was never intended to be a gaming CPU until Sony came around and decided to use it for their Playstation 3. Yet, the Cell gaming performance when compare to a math calculation yields completely different results from what I hear often...
I think we should ask Super Nintendo Chalmers for a ruling on the over use of the word super.
Slashdot: FOX news for nerds, stuff that matters.
If you want Fair and Balanced, you shouldn't be reading /.
:)
I hear Fox News is the place for that.
Only one of those statements is intended as sarcasm, but I'll let the reader decide which
No sig for you!!
Really. Don't be too specific when discussing technology in your writing. Nothing is more boring than a dated speculative technology novel.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
> Question: why do you read Slashdot.
For the linked articles and the comments from the few people who actually have some insight into the issues at hand.
-
Bobfrankly, Post-PS3 Purchase Trauma Therapist
Wild guess here but it probably really is computationally faster than the what was the fastest computer in the world of say 20 years ago.
Rather than a sense of the word 'supercomputer' being devalued, maybe its definition just needs to keep up with the times.
I had a look at using multiple PS3s for simulations a while ago. Purely based on the ass-rocking-ness of the CELL chip.
There are servers that use the CELL chip, from IBM, see the Blade server. But the Blade server is quite a bit expensive; that is 8 PS3's at the UK price was cheaper the last time I looked. On top of all that is the 'pooling' that the CELL chip does, while this won't be that good for simulation (with current, popular implementations, e.g. MPI2), it will be awesome for games: succinctly, any process that requires extra 'power' can request another node from the 'pool' and release it back when it is under less strain. The transport latency (often the biggest latency in Parallel, even with fibre optic switches, unless its a purely Monte Carlo sim...) is much reduced by having all processors on a single die. The architecture is a mix with vector based operations as well.
Prima facie it would be perfect to use multiple PS3s. After speaking to some HPC chaps, at Edinburgh Uni,they informed me that the memory on the PS3's is pretty low (512MB split between video and the conventional) which can be a pain if you want to perform REALLY big simulations (which, when scaling is accounted for, is pretty much the point of using supercomputers... not _necessarily_ speed, lets not make this the point of debate, it is simulation dependent.). I will also add that the memory, though small, is bloody fast. If you can code to keep bloat completely removed, you won't need many BG processes; and split memory requirements between each of the PS3s then it is a really, really nice system. Takes a bit of effort and a learning curve, but there are many resources online, native Linux support is an Uber Bonus for Sony (though I am considering NOT buying a PS3, or many, due to their Media departments behavior!).
It also devalues the meaning of "inexpensive" if you ask me...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You guys are saying two different things. That the PS3 isn't the most popular gaming platform is demonstratebly true. This is not at all the same as saying that the people who have them aren't using them. I know I'm certainly using mine all the time.
The cake is a pie
You need to take your book off the shelf, blow the dust off, too it in the bin, and get a new book. Sorry, but 1TFlop of FP performance on specialized tasks isn't impressive anymore. It's above a normal desktop, but not much. You toss in two nVidia Teslas and you are there. Sorry, but if you can do it in a single workstation case, calling it a supercomputer is to make the term meaningless.
Also you have to remember a few other aspects you are missing from a real supercomputer:
1) General performance. The PS3 can achieve those numbers only on certain problems. It doesn't have that much general purpose CPU power, it has it in special units (much like the Tesla). As such it is really fast on the right kind of problem, but not on everything.
2) Memory. Part of what makes real supercomputer super is the amount of memory they have access to. It's not just about lots of CPU, it's lots of memory. Otherwise, a cluster is better and cheaper.
3) Memory access. In a real supercomputer you have high speed memory access. Meaning that you don't have huge inter-node communication penalties. You've got that with a PS3 since the links are Ethernet.
What they've built here is a cluster, and not even a particularly fast one. That's fine, but it isn't a supercomputer. You chain together 100 high end desktops with Ethernet, again you've got a cluster. Those are fine for problems where the problem is small enough that the entire thing can fit in the memory of each node, and where there's not a lot of need for inter-node communication. Rendering would be an excellent example. Each node works on a different frame, they only need to communicate to a central server to give back the frames, and it's not time critical.
However there are plenty of problems not like that, problems where you need a massive amount of memory, problems where you have to have the nodes communicating all the time. That's what you need a real supercomputer for, and that's what places like the Department of Energy still buy them, rather than just chaining a bunch of cheaper computers together.
'The system' refers to the 8x PS3 setup, you dickwad.
A supercomputer requires at least 100 m^2 floor space, exclusive of cooling equipment. And it takes at least one large tractor trailer for transport to the site.
The first Nintendo started out with the NES or a normal computer, then the Super Nintendo. The N64 came next and was going potentially being called the Ultra64. The Game Cube to be called the Dolphin. So following the naming scheme super = teraflop, ultra = petaflop (or 10 or 100 teraflops, however you want to gauge it), dolphin = exaflop.
Obligatory: An Ultra Computer should be good enough for everyone.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
> 8 games? Yikes, either you play *everything* or you've got some real crud in there. Care to elaborate?
The four games I was referring to were Ninja Gaiden Sigma (88), Skate (85), Stuntman: Ignition (75), and Warhawk (84). The downloadable game was Super Stardust HD (84). None of those games are even remotely close to "crud".
The four games I referred to having an interest in purchasing before the end of the year are Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Rock Band, and the collector's edition of Stranglehold. I might also consider Army Of Two, Assassin's Creed, and Call Of Duty 4, depending on the reviews.
> To give an idea, the top 8 games on PS3 get metacritic scores of 85 or more [...] Only one of those is over 90. To compare, the 360 has *27* games at 85 or more [...] 9 of which rate 90 or more.
The original post had nothing to do with the 360 -- it was about the insinuation that no one uses the PS3 for gaming, which is ridiculous.
You're also making an apples to oranges comparison, because the 360 has been out longer and has a much larger base of titles. But if you want to compare, as of October 13th Metacritic's aggregated ratings for the 360, PS3, and Wii show that the 360 has 264 rated games, the PS3 has 82, and the Wii has 87. Since the PS3 and Wii came out later than the 360 and around the same time as each other, this makes sense.
If you look at the percentage of each console's library that has a metascore of 75 (out of 100) or higher, the PS3 leads with 54%, followed by the 360 at 44%, then the Wii with only 16%. If you go with a metascore of 80+, the PS3 has 34%, the 360 has 27%, and the Wii has only 8% above that level. At 90+ the Wii has 3%, the 360 has 3%, and the PS3 trails with only 1% of its library at that level.
Going by percentages, the PS3 and 360 libraries are of roughly equivalent quality, while the Wii's lags far behind.
> the general sentiment is the PS3 needs a killer app (like a halo, gears of war, or some other really good exclusive title) to make it worth getting.
The general sentiment is also that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and that Britney Spears's personal life is somehow newsworthy. I'll think for myself, thanks.
That said, every console gets a "killer app" eventually. I'm sure the inevitable God Of War III will fill that void if nothing else does beforehand.
Gravity waves are the atmospheric phenomena, gravitational waves are the astrophysical ones.
The ps3 $399 has barely been released in the world (maybe Europe got it recently) but it's not out here and in japan. How can the ps3's lack of success be to something that has yet to occur in most of the world?
I'll give you pricey but thats about it. Most people have the ps2 anyway so it's not too bad for those wanting the cheap unit. I'm still waiting for games.
Hmmm... Pie...
Good post. In addition, I believe that PS3 Linux still prohibits access tothe RSX processor (not sure if this is still the case with the latest firmware - please correct me if I'm wrong). So unfortunately a lot of the cool math tricks that you can do with the GPU are unavailable, and also effectively cuts the amount of RAM down to 256MB, since the other 256 is reserved for the graphics processor.
"And when everyone's super, no one will be."
Evil Mwaahhaahaha
If you can buy all the components at Wal-Mart, it's not a supercomputer. Sorry.
What, you never heard of "Super 8" ?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Is it possible to use a PS3 for number crunching by simply running 6 instances of the program, each solving a different problem? This cell-specific programming seems to require some good amount of man-hours.
I think the record is around 400 teraflops, soon to reach a petaflop. So 40-50 teraflops is a super.
I was told by a staff scientist at Caltech that a common and useful definition is:
'Any computer that performs within an order of magnitude of the current fastest computer is a supercomputer'.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
I know that nobody RTFA around here on
"Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s"
But as you said the price is still high even when comparing to the original super computer. Thankfully the guy found a way around
Waaaaah ! I wan't a free PS3 two ! And a Pony !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
He wasn't paying $5000 for a 200-node supercomputer run. He was paying "as much as $5,000" for runs using "up to 500" processors. So, basically, he was paying ~$10 per processor, per run.
The 8-PS3 "supercomputer" is returning speeds equal to about a 200 node run. So his $3200 computer is costing the same as a $2,000 run. But the $3200 doesn't include the rack, the electricity, cooling, and other expenses to put the multi-PS3 unit together or to run it.
Still, with Amazon elastic cloud computing, you can get a 200 "computing unit" run for just short of a week 24/7 for $3200.
Start a happiness pandemic
hitting that big SOB with a bomb
We could borrow the bulk quantity diaper package names from Pampers et al, including such greats as Mega, Ultra, Ultra Mega, and Jumbo. All super computers will be reclassified as Ultra Mega Super Computers.
In other words: it's funny, laugh.
>the PS3 game drought has been over for a while now...
Oh, good - then there are now plenty of games gathering dust on the shelves to keep the PS3s which are gathering dust on the shelves company.
> saying that people aren't buying PS3s or PS3 games in any real volume is still a matter of fact more than it is an opinion.
That fact hasn't been disputed, but it also has absolutely nothing to do with the contention that no one uses the PS3 for gaming.
I have 4 Coleco Vision to spare.
Can you build me a super computer, please?
> i think he means nobody is playing games on this particular system (of 8 ps3's) not that nobody plays games on the ps3 in general. how can so many people have misinterpreted that?
The quote is "since nobody is actually playing games on the system, it makes sense to use them for research projects like this". Your interpretation would only make sense if these particular PS3s were already lying around, ready to use for any purpose, and someone chose to use them for research instead of gaming. As the article states, Gaurav Khanna's interest in the PS3 was specifically for research computation, and that's why Sony gave him 8 of them for free.
If there was any misinterpretation here, it wouldn't seem to be on my end.
The term supercomputer is relative to what is in the top tier of all computation intensive platforms, relative to current standards. It is a supercomputer by yesterday's standards, but not todays. It's important not to discredit yesterday's standards, but it shouldn't be done at the expense of todays by leaving out one sentence that could have avoided this thread line. That sentence would haven't just been one that included, by yesterday's standards. But of course, there wouldn't be as many hits on the site if it were kept in perspective like that. One's and zeros have no bias. The fastest, is still, the fastest. And that will always be relative. You can't blame Steve Jobs for this breach. We all do this. We are all biased. One's and zeros don't have emotions, or reality distortion fields. Every RDF, is the responsibility of the person who let it out, no matter who did it first. If I believe in something that is false, that's my responsibility. If I put it out there further, after it came from someone else, that's my responsibility as well, not the responsibility of the person before me, even if I was duped or didn't have all the facts. I guess the only remaining question would be, or questions, are: How long ago is yesterday? When are standards considered current? Future shock is not considered by computers, but we have to consider it, considering how fast things compound with regard to technological evolution, in order to keep our definitions abreast with that evolution.
> No, whats funny is that the downloadable game was probably a better game then the 4 disc-based games you purchased.
No, it wasn't, although Super Stardust HD is still a great game.
> The "game drought" may be over, but the "quality game drought" lives on.
It depends on your definition of "quality". The PS3 is currently lagging in extremely high-rated games (90+), but it's doing better than the other current-gen consoles when you look at the percentage of games that rate 75+ or 80+ out of 100. Let me refer you to my other post which goes into more detail.
He's not running excel on the fucking things. That's general computing.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
Beautiful! Truly uplifting to see someone live up to his nick. Which is what I'm doing with this totally inane and fanboyish comment (me feeling deep loving sensations for people who think before they type must be fanboism).
you fucking troll fuck.
this isn't news, this is an excuse to push someones personal agenda
8 PS3s offer at least 1.6TFLOPS. The 2007.6 TOP500 supercomputers bottom out at just over 4TFLOPS. Two years ago, this PS3 cluster might even have made it to the TOP500 list proper; nine years ago it might have topped the list.
It might not be in the top 500, but it does seem to be a supercomputer.
--
make install -not war
I wouldn't pay $10 for any of the games you listed for either system.
Only if you misinterpret the statistics. Why are PS3 game sales lower than the others on the chart you linked? Because the PS3 has a smaller install base. Why does it have a smaller install base? WRT the 360, it's because the PS3 was released a year later. If you go back to vgchartz and look at weekly sales, you'll see that the PS3 currently is selling about 30% fewer units that the other consoles (and this is shortly after Orange Box and Halo 3 were released for the 360). So if you're still claiming that no one is buying PS3s "in any real volume", then I guess you're really saying that none of the current gen consoles are selling.
"I have no sense of humor and and overly defensive by five or six orders of magnitude."
And if you think eight is the biggest PS3 cluster anybody is going to build, I've got a 640 KB PC to sell you.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
HAHAHA
ps3 sux0rs. sony is shit hahahaha ps3 is a failure hahahaha
hilarious. and it's mostly true. it WOULD be true
except....
people don't know about..
ratchet and clank. it will rule the world.. or at least it'll make the few people that don't buy into popular hype and opinion (or anti-hype in this case), and actually try things out themselves instead of yelling at a machine they've never used, very happy
Wow, eight whole games?
I'd say getting a whole discussion thread about PS3s being ganged together to make an inexpensive supercomputer for scientific use makes this an ADVERTISING bargain for Sony despite the derogatory tone of the person submitting the story.
Letter To Iran
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of thos--- oh wait.
Its a long way away from the average computer at home! The PS3 has a cell processor. It has 8 compute nodes directed by an IBM Power processor (I think its a Power 440). IBM's Power processor line is a lot (A LOT) faster than offerings by Intel or AMD. The 8 processing units really are like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of Arithmetic Logic Units. The Power has excellent branch prediction and Turing complete instruction set. The sub processing units give it single-clock-cycle high precision math. In short, for what this guy is doing, a single PS3 is already about 150 times as fast as an Intel processor clocked at the same speed. He has 8. 150*8=1200. This 'contraption' is 1200 times as fast as your 'typical' home computer. Supercomputer? Ok, just barely, but yep. Oh, and by the way, IBM is taking 10,000 cell processors (each linked to an AMD Opteron), and is building their next, fastest-in-the-world supercomputer, code named RoadRunner as I type this.
I hear Faux News is the place for that.
Only one of those statements is intended as sarcasm, but I'll let the reader decide which
Eight cores and 56 SPEs.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Screw the so-called supercomputer, what about these gravity waves? They sound like something we might be able to harness for interplanetary/ interstellar travel.
The summary does not say there are no games to be played on a PS3. The summary says there are no people actually playing games on the thing.
First of all, yes, I do own a PS3.
...). And it has a bunch of crap.
Yes, the PS3 does not have enough games. It has a few good, exclusive games: Motorstorm, Resistance, Heavenly Sword, Warhawk. It has a few ports which play worse on the PS3 than on the Xbox (Tony Hawk's, skate, Ridge Racer,
I own four Bluray games and about 6 online games for the PS3. For my Wii I, I own about 15 DVD games and the internal memory is filled with VC games. Of course, both consoles can't compete with the 360.
That was a great Slashdot beatdown. Bravo. I also own a PS3 and got it for two reasons. One: Metal Gear Solid 4. Two: Grand Theft Auto 4. I can't play those on any other systems (well, I can't play them on ANYTHING right now, but that's besides the point) so I got a PS3. The number of good games means nothing to me, so when people say there are no good games I don't really care. I've got Skate, Ninja Gaiden, and Virtua Tennis. There's three good games right there. I've only got so much money. I'm not going to be buying eighty games so I don't care.
Despite this fella getting his rig for free from SCE, if you're looking to do serious computation on Cell processors you're best off talking to IBM about getting some of their Cell Blades. They pack dual processors on them and you get the full eight SPU's plus more RAM and very fast comms. And yes, they run Linux. I haven't used these blades, but IBM gave me a sneak peek a few years ago.
A lot of people (still) discount the performance that the Cell is capable of. If you know the basics of how to work it then you can achieve incredible performance gains over bog-standard scalar code with next-to trivial effort. (Although I can't really say what it's like for developing to run on Linux)
I don't think it's about devaluing a title, but to redefine what criteria be present to make said title applicable. What about quantum computers? Should quantum computers be the new supercomputers, hence redefining what a supercomputer is and de-listing current supercomputers?
No sig for you! Come back one year!