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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' :)
64 cpu's. That seems supercomputerish enough for me.
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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.
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
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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Maybe his research grant doesn't stretch as far as heating the office. Win-win situation in that case.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Check out Mercury systems. These aren't exactly for home use, but they are shipping Cell + Linux computer systems. However, given the economics, it might just be better to go with a PS3, if you can live with the memory limitations. There may be other companies, but checking at TerraSoft (one vendor for PowerPC Linux software and hardware) takes you right back to IBM and Mercury hardware.
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.
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.
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?
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!).
Please enlighten me. Who is stupid enough to by a million+ dollar computer without factoring in facility costs?
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.
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).
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.
Double precision floating point is emulated in software on the PS3 as well.
As a professional programmer working in the games industry (on both XBOX 360 and PS3), I can tell you that's completely untrue. You can verify this easily with information available to the general public on the CELL microprocessor.
The CELL supports Double Precision in hardware. However, the SPU vector instructions only run on Single Precision which allows for up to 8 SP ops (4 X Multiply+Add's) per cycle. Double Precision is scalar (non-vectored) and also not pipelined so the throughput is much slower since DP operations can cause stalls until they complete (there are rumors that IBM is working on a CELL that pipelines DP which will help immensely). Properly pipelined and vectorized Single Precision work can be 30-50 times faster than the scalar non-pipelined DP but the CELL still has true DP hardware which is much faster than emulation by orders of magnitude.