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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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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.
Now we know who bought all the PS3s!
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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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
> 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).