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Eight PS3 'Supercomputer' Ponders Gravity Waves

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the because-you-can dept.

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' :)

4 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Re:8 systems x 8 cores = by Kupek · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's only six cores available to Linux per Cell processor on a PS3. One is reserved for the Game OS, and one is disabled to achieve a higher yield on fabrication. (The Game OS is always running, since Linux actually runs on top of a hypervisor.)

  2. Re:Inexpensive, eh? by smussman · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah, but is that real money or is that subdivision expensing. In other words, does it lose $240 because Sony must use $800 of resources to produce a $600 product, or because sony-chipfab charges sony-board-assembly $60 for a part that cost $5 to produce? I found the original analysis of the PS3 cost here. At least 50% of the components are made by other manufacturers.
  3. Re:Inexpensive, eh? by SailorSpork · · Score: 5, Informative

    How much something "costs" to produce isn't as simple as the cost of parts. It may cost $5 for just the parts, it may also cost and extra $1-5 for the direct labor to put the board together, and it may cost and extra $1 to ship it. Then there's the cost of maintaining a chip fab, indirect labor and mangement costs and bribes to the chinese government to keep their cheap wage factory certified, divided over the 2-300 PS3's produced per month to keep up with worldwide demand, not to mention the cost of worldwide marketing, the cost of years of system & Blu-Ray R&D spread over each unit... keep in mind that the cost of making your PS3, Wii or software title is more than just more than the sum of the cost of the individual parts.
     
    Sorry, that was my Cost Accounding class talking, I'll stop now.

  4. Re:Obligatory by adisakp · · Score: 5, Informative

    It would've been cheaper to just buy a Cray.

    If you read the article and followed the link to his PS3 Gravity Grid site, you'd know a couple things about the cost (FREE) for this computational power:

    #1) The total cost of purchasing an entire "PS3 Gravity Grid" supercomputer for yourself is less than the cost of a single simulation run on a BlueGene. In other words, you can buy the cow, the pasture, and a barn for the price of a gallon of milk.

    #2) Sony *DONATED* his 8-node cluster (albeit with 20GB PS3's which they were closing out at the time) so he actually got a "supercomputer" for nearly free.

    #3) The power of the 8-node PS3 cluster is roughly the same as a 200 node partition on a BlueGene SuperComputer (1 PS3 = 25 Blue Gene nodes). With 8 Cell CPUs, he has 56 SPU's running at ~3GHz to crank through his computations. This would mean a single CELL SPU is roughly 4X more powerful than a single BlueGene node which isn't unreasonable considering that it runs at a higher clockspeed (the supercomputer has to worry more about heat dissipation with hundreds or thousands of cores).

    #4) I believe that by the US Gov't's somewhat outdated standards, a PS2 qualifies as a supercomputer. The FPU power in a PS3 is on ther order of 200 times higher than that of the PS2 for single precision and considerably more for double precision (which is emulated in software on the PS2).