From PlayStation to Supercomputer for $50,000

New York Times ^ | 2003-05-26 | By JOHN MARKOFF

[Reaganesque]

Actually, this is their excuse for spending all of their time online playing "EverQuest". "What am I doing, professor? Uh, researching parrallel processing, yeah, that's it."

Seriously, this is quite cool. From those crappy Atari's we all bought 15 years ago to this. Holy cow!

[Elsie]

CRAPPY!?!?!

We cut our EYEteeth on those babies!!!
(as well as Commodore 64's)

[ken in texas]

Seriously, this is quite cool.

A couple weeks ago I ran across an article that discussed how the advances in video chip technology are being harnessed to move into a new realm of supercomputing. There are some fascinating applications being discussed. If I can dig up the URL I'll post it.

[Oberon]

We cut our EYEteeth on those babies!!! (as well as Commodore 64's)

Limited hardware fosters good programming. Programmers used to work wonders on DEC PDP-11s; even the Timex Sinclair had a pretty good BASIC on it. Try and find someone who can hand-code in assembly language any more...

On the other hand, give a programmer 100GB on the hard drive, 512MB of RAM, and 2 MHz of processor speed, and what do you get? Applications written in Visual Basic.

[RadioAstronomer]

The scientists have their eyes on a variety of consumer hardware, he said. For example Nvidia, the maker of graphics cards for personal computers, is now selling a high-performance graphics card that is capable of executing 51 billion mathematical operations a second.

I am typing this on a PC that uses an 800MHz bus, dual 400MHz DDR ram, a 3.06GHz Hyperthreaded 800MHz FSB P4C, Intel 875 Chipset, gigabit ethernet, Radeon 9800 Pro vid card, and dual Viewsonic VX900 19" flat screen monitors.

All of this power is driven not by military or scientific computing. This rapid increase is driven by GAMING and Gamers.

[GoLightly]

It's capitalism in action. The need for speed by the masses trumps fewer specialized uses.

[caspera]

How the hell do you use the graphics chip as a CPU? Isn't it expecting a list of OpenGL primitives?

[eno_]

Two weeks ago I was optimizing a transparent bitblt (no scaling, same bit-depth, no other rasterops, so it was very simple) in ARM assembler.

[eno_]

Graphics chips are highly parallel and have programmable microcode. Coding new operations would be difficult, but for some things it might be worth the effort. You would have to get somthing like 5X or more than you could from the CPU to even bother looking at this approach.

[Hank Rearden]

Try and find someone who can hand-code in assembly language any more...

Check out this guy. I've been using Steve Gibson's stuff since Spinrite 1 and he's good.

His site has all kinds of excellent info and is a great place to test your firewall to see if it's really tight.

[Grampa7030]

Two questions come to mind. Aren't he sales of supercomputers restricted so that they are not used against us for military purposes? And with the low cost here, will the price of supercomputers be forced to drop so thjat they are generally affordable? Prices in the tens of millions seem to be now out of the question when you can just hire a couple of computer scientists from Illinois to build one.

[Rebelbase]

I recall reading an article where Saddam's government had placed a huge order for Play Station II machines.

[Mannaggia l'America]

It's capitalism in action.

Capitalism? Where did they get the $50,000 to do this?

[SC DOC]

Now it is apparent why the Iraq military bought 1400 of these babies in Detroit in December 2000. I doubt they were for Christmas presents. I wonder how many other dual use technologies are readily available at Best Buy.

[MainFrame65]

"By contrast, it is almost impossible for researchers to install the Linux system on Microsoft's Xbox game console."

Gee, what a surprise! I wonder if Microsoft knows about this little problem. I'm sure their tech support people will get right on it....

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

Good point! I doubt if the Iraqi military even wanted them to practice flight simulation.
Maybe Homeland Security should require that the game manufacturers install hidden GPS tracking devices in every game box!

[DPB101]

the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second

January second of last year, Bush signed an Executive Order allowing more powerful computers to be exported. Many on the right went ballistic. Bush was just like Clinton! Selling out to BIG BUSINESS and arming our enemies!

The Bush EO alllowed the export of any computer capable of under 190,000 MTOP (Millions of Theoretcial Operations Per Second).

This Sony Playstation cluster is capable of 500,000 MTOPS.

[free from tyranny]

How soon before we get to 3-D holographs. The Sixth-Day with Arnold Schwartzeneggar had some very cool holographs.Also , Minority report had 3-D holographs contained on CD type disks.

My belief is that holographs have the potential to transform commerce, communications and life in general.They could be the "next big thing."