Parallel Processing For Cardiac Simulations Using an Xbox 360

Foot-in-Mouth writes "Physorg has an article about a researcher, Dr. Simon Scarle at the University of Warwick's WMG Digital Laboratory, who needed to model some cardiological processes. Conventionally, he would requisition time on a university parallel-processing computer or use a network of PCs. However, Dr. Scarle's work history included gaming industry experience as a software engineer at a company associated with Microsoft Games Studio. His idea was that researchers could use Xbox 360s as an inexpensive parallel computing platform due to the console's hefty parallel processing-enabled GPU. He said, 'Although major reworking of any previous code framework is required, the Xbox 360 is a very easy platform to develop for and this cost can easily be outweighed by the benefits in gained computational power and speed, as well as the relative ease of visualization of the system.'"

Comments

Re:Why not the PS3?

[mkaushik]

He should've used something like CUDA instead, for long term gains. This would have shown far better performance than the Xbox's GPU (which is quite dated now), and easy scalability as better GPUs keep coming to the market. His familiarity with Xbox programming might have enabled him to come up to speed with CUDA quickly.

Re:Because it's an advetorial, perhaps?

[innerweb]

Only problem I have with the X-Box is how crappy the hardware has been so far. Rings of death, circle of death, failed rom drives, failed hard drives ...

Why on Earth would you want to rely on such a poorly constructed piece of hardware to do real work? Every component has failures, but when so many of my childrens' friends are on their 3rd or fourth in a few years, there is a real issue. And, no, they are not abusive to their equipment. The same kids have Wii,s PCs, PS3s, GameCubes and more without all the issues they have with X-Box 360s.

InnerWeb