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How To Build a Homebrew PS3 Cluster Supercomputer
eldavojohn writes "UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide designed to show you how to build your own supercomputer for about $4,000. They are also hoping that by publishing this guide they will bring about a new kind of software development targeting this architecture & grid (I know a few failed NLP projects of my own that could use some new hardware). If this catches on for research institutions it may increase Sony's sales, but they might not be seeing the corresponding sale of games spike (where they make the most profit)."
Couple issues with this as an alternative to the garden-variety x86 cluster connected with InfiniBand:
Slow network interconnect. For problems that are not trivially parallel, network latency is usually a big deal. Ethernet doesn't cut it.
Lack of RAM. 'Nuff said.
Have to care about Cell and PS3 architecture. The codes ("codes" has a slightly different meaning in the context of supercomputing) have to be modified to take advantage of this very specific architecture. Software always outlives hardware, so in the long run the effort may not be worth it.
That said, it's really cheap. If your application isn't held back too much by these issues then enjoy your insanely cheap cluster!
The number of PS3's sold will never be enough to hurt Sony's bottom line, but will boost the image of the console. Having credible scientists call your product a "supercomputer" is worth something. Does Ferrari's Forumla 1 racing team pay for itself? Nah, it's an investment to promote an image.
IBM is probably banking on the existence of people who want Cell processors in systems with more than 256megs of RAM. Other IBM value-adds would presumably include rack mountability, support for netbooting and other convenient management stuff, and so forth.
If your application leans almost entirely on the CPU with very little need for RAM, and you have an army of screwdriver monkeys(or grad students) to do all the legwork, the PS3 is an excellent deal. If you need something with RAM capacity that wasn't a joke in 2001, and/or management features that won't have you tearing your eyes out when you have 10,000 of them, then IBM smells opportunity.