PS3 supercomputing?

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Tommy Anderberg
Posts: 47
Joined: November 24 2005
Affiliation: independent

PS3 supercomputing?

Post by Tommy Anderberg » November 12 2006

If you are anything like me, it's been years since you had any time for computer games, let alone game consols. So at first, the news that Sony's PlayStation 3 was released in Japan today, with North America to follow on November 17, may not strike you as particularly interesting.

But a look at the specs may change your mind. I did finally look today, to see what all the hoopla was about, and it really made me sit up and take notice. Here's why:

The PS3 is the first mass market device powered by the Cell Broadband Engine, which made the nerd news a few months ago, when a group at LBNL presented eye-popping estimates of its potential for scientific computing (press release; PDF report). IBM is reportedly using up to 16000 Cells for the Roadrunner supercomputer being built at LANL, but if you wanted to get your hands on one yourself, until today your best option would probably have been a Cell Accelerator Board from Mercury Computer Systems, selling for USD 7999 a piece. As of today, if you are in Japan (and prepared to battle a long line of fanatic gamers) you can get a PS3 for USD 420.

Just a black box console, inaccessible to independent software developers, you say? Apparently not: according to the trade press, the PS3 is to ship with Linux preinstalled -- and if not, these guys will be more than happy to sell you a PS3 distro of Yellow Dog Linux. Then head over to IBM's Cell Broadband Engine Resource Center and grab the Cell BE SDK and IDE. Cross-compiler and full system simulator included.

So you have Linux, you have a full set of developer tools, and you have Ethernet. With the money it took to buy one of Mercury's accelerator boards, you can now buy 18 PS3s and still have change over for a router and cables to LAN them up. Depending on your requirements, Beowulf.org may have all you need to complete the setup of your own little supercomputing cluster.

Too good to be true? Well, there are caveats: as currently implemented, the Cell BE really shines in single precision, but is not as strong in double precision. See the LBNL report for details (it suggests that minor hardware changes could improve double precision performance a lot, holding out hope for future versions). The PS3 may have too little RAM for some applications, 256 MB. The Cell itself can handle much more, but it's not clear whether the PS3 could be upgraded. Only six of the eight "synergetic processing units" may be available to you. And of course, taking full advantage of the Cell's number crunching power is not automatic; you need to parallelize your code first (again, see the LBNL report).

Still, this is the first time ever that I find myself wondering: should I buy a game console? Or maybe a whole bunch of them?

Charles Shapiro
Posts: 24
Joined: February 05 2005
Affiliation: University of Portsmouth

PS3 supercomputing?

Post by Charles Shapiro » March 10 2007

Someone did it:

Engineer Creates First Academic Playstation 3 Computing Cluster

http://www.physorg.com/news92674403.html

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