
Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with a Cluster of Eight PlayStation 3s - brett
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer
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rms
PS3s are so good for this because they are sold below cost and are some of the
best physics processors anyways. I thought that there might be money in
writing some software to allow for easy PS3 clusters and after two more
minutes of thinking realized that there was no money it. Still, it's a great
example of just how powerful computers are getting.

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rglullis
What stopped me from buying a PS3 just to toy around with it was the fact that
(AFAIK) the Linux kernel does not use the special processing units. Basically,
I would be buying an under-priced PowerPC.

I do believe that it is getting harder to think of how to make money on things
like that because the set of applications that are (as a whole) processor-
bound are getting ever smaller. It seems that everything (except videogames,
of course) is either memory-bound or IO-bound.

Outside universities, the only people that could be interested in PS3 clusters
would be crackers that want to break passwords using brute force.

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barrettcolin
You can use the SPEs just fine under PS3 Linux - plenty of information on
cellperformance.com; access to the GPU (and possibly other juicy parts, like
certain IO devices) is restricted (so no hardware acceleration for graphics).

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rglullis
Thanks for the pointer, man.

Suddenly, getting a PS3 got a lot more interesting.

