

US Airforce builds supercomputer out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 - bjonathan
http://www.techeye.net/hardware/us-airforce-builds-supercomputer-out-of-1760-sony-playstation-3

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jessriedel
I thought the reason it made economics sense for the Air Force to use this
gaming console (as opposed to any other computer) was that Sony sells PS3s at
a loss in order to spur sales of PS3 games. But Sony can't be subsidizing this
by more than $100/unit, which would only save the Air Force of order $1
million. How is it saving them more than 10 times that? Are PS3s really sold
at such scales that they are 10 times cheaper than a non-gaming option for
equivalent computing?

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scott_s
It can be true if you take it as a given that they want to use the Cell
processor. Cell blade servers cost about $20,000. There are no options for
getting the Cell between a PS3 and a Cell blade.

But, those tend to have two Cell processors, they're a more recent version,
and it's an actual high performance computer, with lots of memory and fast
interconnects. So they are in no way "equivalent."

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jessriedel
This doesn't answer my question. There are alternative processors out there.
Unless the manufacturer of the Cell processors has some sort of magic which
lets them make them 10 times cheaper than all other companies, there should be
plenty of competitors which would be happy to supply a medium sized order.

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yatsyk
1,760 PS3s 50,000 times faster then average consumer laptop. Even adding PS3
GPU power this statement looks like exaggeration.

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metageek
Might not be that much of an exaggeration, though. The AF probably uses it to
simulate things like airframes and nuclear explosions; those are
embarrassingly parallel, so you'll get full use of all the cores. At 8 cores
per box [1], that gets you up to 14k times faster, if the cores are the same
speed as that laptop.

[1] The Cell has one PowerPC core and 8 SPUs; but the PS3 is shipped with one
SPU disabled, so they can get the yield up.

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scott_s
And another SPE is reserved for the GameOS, so code running under Linux on a
PS3 can only access 6 SPEs.

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Maakuth
I'd love to hear their opinion on removal of the "Other OS" option. I also
know several other institutions that have built their own supercomputers out
of PlayStations and aren't that happy about that move.

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ZoFreX
Why not? If the supercomputer was pre-existing, the Other OS option won't
disappear unless they do a firmware update. The only reason I know of to do an
update is to play the latest games, so unless they're having sessions of GTA
in between protein folding, I doubt it's an issue.

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dredge
Replacing broken PS3 hardware is an issue. As in, they can't do it.

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dmm
PS3 firmwares can now be downgraded. Somebody discovered a service dongle key,
which allows for downgrading FWs (but not the latest). That would make it
slightly easier to find replacements.

Also somebody is working on some patches which allow linux to run on top of
the same gameos hypervisor that the commercial games do. This allows access to
an extra spu and slightly more ram too. It does require an exploit to allow
the execution of unsigned code. Here's the git repo:
<http://git.marcansoft.com/?p=asbestos.git>

Hector Martin has been playing with kinect for the past month so that explains
the lack of progress.

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drblast
This made a lot of sense when the PS3 first came out, but since then we've
gotten low-power architectures and extremely powerful and cheap GPU's.

<http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_72770.html>

Those, for example, are dirt cheap and have similar benefits to the Cell. And
you don't have to work around a platform that was designed for playing games.

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rokhayakebe
What sort of applications do you run on, or what do you do with a computer 50k
times faster than the average pc?

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jessriedel
I believe most supercomputers simulate things, e.g. climate science, protein
folding, aerodynamics, QCD, etc. There is pretty much a ceiling to processor
speeds, so the special thing about supercomputers is that they put a bunch of
processors in parallel. The problem of simulating large physical systems
happens to be particularly amenable to parallel computing.

