PS3 Grid – Amazing computing power
Ariticle on MSNBC.com:PlayStation 3 tackles black hole vibrations
Consoles capable of running simulations that rival supercomputer
“Rather than renting computer time on a supercomputer that could cost $5,000 per simulation, Burko and his colleagues used the PS3 Gravity Grid built by Gaurav Khanna, a physics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
The cluster can be built for around $6,000, and allows simulations to be repeated at no extra cost. The system is tailored to simulations that require massive amounts of computations, but relatively little RAM memory.”
Filed under General | Comment (1)
One Response to “PS3 Grid – Amazing computing power”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Distributed computing is the future; this can also be accomplished with a network of low-end home PCs though. It would probably be a bit pricier to do it with PCs, but the tradeoff is that you have more power and flexibility — if your computing tasks are CPU-intensive but require little memory, build systems with quad-core processors but only maybe 512MB RAM or less; if you do a lot of floating-point crunching, throw beefy video cards in there and take advantage of their newfound flexibility (Dr. Dobbs’ Journal has an article on this: http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/206900471).
Another argument for using PCs, even when the PS3’s computing power seems more cost-effective for a given project, is that PCs are component-upgradeable. A year or two down the road, one will be able to simply buy new CPUs for the cluster at maybe $250 apiece, and get a massive boost in computing power. However, to upgrade the PS3 cluster, one would need to replace the systems entirely — presumably with next-gen consoles, at a cost of $400+ per unit. Also, if it’s discovered at some point that the cluster has insufficient memory, the PC systems’ memory can be upgraded for $50-100 per unit… the PS3s simply can’t be upgraded at all, and the computing project will have to suffer the bottleneck.
Bottom line: building a distributed computing network with PCs instead of PS3s will probably be more cost-effective in the end. The novelty of using a gaming console for distributed computing is not lost on me, and for projects that need to get a cluster up quickly and cheaply, they do probably serve the purpose quite well… but, at least from my perspective, the PC still reigns supreme overall.
Wow, I didn’t expect to have that much to say! Ah well, I guess I’m passionate about computing and computer hardware ^_^