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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' :)
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.
Didn't Sony try to claim one single PS3 was a "supercomputer" in the run-up to launch?
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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.
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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.
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Not true. I know of at least one place where they have a Cray and can't afford the electric bill to switch it on. They cost a fortune just to sit and look pretty too: it's taking up room on campus that could be used for other things.
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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.
Maybe it's jsut me, but that sounds like a pretty good deal from Sony IIRC, Sony sells consoles at a loss, and then gets that money back over the life of the console with license fees from games. So selling 8 consoles which will not generate money from game license fees, but still having to take the loss is not a good deal for Sony.
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.
Before the PS3 was released as a gaming console, the company my brother works for (aerospace, not a gaming company) received a few from Sony that were for development only and will not play games at all. They're gray in color and much larger, heavier and noisier than consumer PS3s.. but everyone on the dev team there was in awe of its speed.
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>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.
In my shop you pretty much need to be an NSF-funded project in order to really use the teragrid; and the supercomputing center will bill for it.
If you can do your own computing in your own lab with your own equipment, especially if it costs less, it may not be very important that your PS3 cluster (vector processors! yay!) is not as fast as the top-500 machine on the other side of campus. There's something similar going on right here in my lab. We get to use #102 from the top-500 list, but we do lots of rendering on a cluster of re-purposed desktops instead.
A cluster in your lab that you don't have to negotiate for, play politics to use, or share, is usually going to be "better" when you look at total benefits instead of just overall horsepower.
It's not just about money. You wouldn't believe the political shenanigans that goes on in university HPC. We have less of a problem since we do a lot of practical work for NOAA and the USGS, but someone doing purely academic work in physics or atmospheric science might have real difficulties.
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