
New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations - auferstehung
http://www.smh.com.au/news/articles/new-supercomputer-is-a-rack-of-playstations/2008/02/26/1203788327976.html?page=fullpage
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xirium
The PlayStation3 has gigabit Ethernet, which is ideal for multi-tier servers.
However, the PlayStation3 only has 512MB RAM. Regardless, it may be useful for
many computationally intensive tasks:

The PS3's hardware has also been used to build supercomputers for high-
performance computing. Terra Soft Solutions has a version of Yellow Dog Linux
for the PlayStation 3, and sells PS3s with Linux pre-installed, in single
units, and 6 and 32 node clusters. In addition, RapidMind is pushing their
stream programming package for the PS3. Also, on January 3, 2007, Dr. Frank
Mueller, Associate Professor of Computer Science at NCSU, clustered 8 PS3s.
Mueller commented that the 512 MB of system RAM is a limitation for this
particular application, and is considering attempting to retrofit more RAM. --
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3>

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nostrademons
Holy...when I was working at my last job (a financial software startup), I
joked to my boss that we should port our software to the PS3's GPU and run a
cluster of PlayStations. The math in quantitative finance is rather similar to
the sort of massively-parallelizable vector calculations in computer graphics.
Plus, I had this amusing image of hedge fund managers slaving away at their
Dell workstations while the PlayStations were all locked in the server room,
crunching numbers.

I'm impressed that someone actually did it, which goes to show that there's no
idea too crazy to implement.

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Electro
Hampster powered workstations... I'm not sure if it would be a disaster for
productivity because they're cute or because their poop stinks, and to power a
workstation the problem would be multiplied to the 2nd or 3rd power.

I'm sure someone could implement it, but I'm not sure how wise it would be...
maybe a PetSmart could do it first.

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randomhack
Calling 16 PS3s a supercomputer is a bit of a stretch. The article doesnt
quote any numbers either. Cell with 8 SPEs can do about 200 Gflops SP matrix
multiply. So I assume PS3 can do about 150 Gflops. 16*150=2400 gflops single
precision .. not a supercomputer by todays standards i would say.

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comatose_kid
I'm curious - where did you get that 200 Gflops number from? Is that
theoretical, or actual for large values (say 10k) of N?

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randomhack
Thats from a paper called "Potential of Cell processor for scientific
computing" .. they quote a figure of 200 gigaflops for single precision GEMM
(generalized matrix multiply) for large square matrices (using a simulator?).
Assuming their model is very accurate, its actual 200 gflops.

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Tichy
Wouldn't it be easier to use "full" Cell processors? Are they much more
expensive than PS3s? I assume IBM sells other computers with Cell chip?

How do cell chips compare with modern graphic cards, I think they can be
abused to do a similar thing?

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pmjordan
According to
[http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDis...](http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?categoryId=4611686018425192155&storeId=1&catalogId=-840&langId=-1)
a blade with two cell chips costs $10k. Two PS3s come in quite a bit cheaper
than that. Okay, so they don't have as fast an interconnect and as much RAM,
but it depends on your problem whether that matters at all.

Modern graphics cards are also useful for number-crunching, but it's pretty
awkward to develop general-purpose code for them. Not that the Cell is all
that easy to code for with its SPE-local SRAM and explicit DMAs for memory
access. As far as I can tell, though, the Cell development tools are more
mature, and it wins in terms of FLOPS-per-watt. I suspect the real win for the
Cell is that its interconnect latency is tiny compared to your average GPU,
which is great for clustering.

The thing that's killing mainstream adoption for both options in the HPC
sector is lack of double-precision (64-bit) floating-point support. There's a
version of Cell on its way that fixes that problem, however.

Note: I've not written code for the Cell myself, although I have for GPUs.

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Tichy
Thanks, very interesting.

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alaskamiller
sounds like a business venture

