Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s
Posted on 05/26/2003 6:27:15 AM PDT by Lessismore
As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the computing power of sophisticated but inexpensive video-game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2's.
The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000. The center's researchers believe the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second, well within the definition of supercomputer, although it may not rank among the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open source Linux operating system, is that the only hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the individual game machines in a rack and plugging them together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch. The center's scientists bought 100 machines, but are holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display application.
"It took a lot of time because you have to cut all of these things out of the plastic packaging," said Craig Steffen, a senior research scientist at the center, who is one of four scientists working part time on the project.
The scientists are taking advantage of a standard component of the Sony video-game console that was originally intended to move and transform pixels rapidly on a television screen to produce lifelike graphics. The chip is not the PlayStation 2's MIPS microprocessor, but rather a graphics co-processor known as the Emotion Engine. That custom designed silicon chip is capable of producing up to 6.5 billion mathematical operations a second.
The impressive performance of the game machine, which has been on the market for a few years, underscores a radical shift that has taken place in the computing world since the end of the cold war in the late 1980's, according to the researchers.
While the most advanced computing technologies have historically been developed first for large corporate users and military contractors, increasingly the fastest computers are being developed for the consumer market and for products meant to be placed under Christmas trees.
"If you look at the economics of game platforms and the power of computing on toys, this is a long-term market trend and computing trend," said Dan Reed, the supercomputing center's director. "The economics are just amazing. This is going to drive the next big wave in high-performance computing."
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.
The pace of the consumer computing world is moving so quickly that the researchers are building the PlayStation 2-based supercomputer as an experiment to see how quickly they can take advantage of off-the-shelf low-cost technologies.
"I think we'd like to be able to transfer a lot of our experience to the next generation," he said.
Despite the computing promise of game consoles that sell for less than $200, the researchers acknowledged that the experiment was likely to be most useful for a group of relatively narrow scientific problems.
They added that while the system was already doing scientific calculations, they cannot be certain about its ultimate computing potential until they write more carefully tuned software routines that can move data in and out of the custom processor quickly. The limited memory of the Sony game console — 32 megabytes of memory — would also restrict the practical applications of the supercomputer, they said.
But they noted that the computer was already running useful calculations on quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, simulations. QCD is a theory concerning the so-called strong interactions that bind elementary particles like quarks and gluons together to form hadrons, the constituents of nuclear matter.
The ability to lower the cost of QCD simulation in itself would be significant, the researchers said, because such problems are the single largest consumer of computing resources on supercomputers at the Department of Energy and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
Still, several supercomputer experts said that the memory and computing bandwidth limitations of the PlayStation would prohibit broader applications of the machine.
Gordon Bell, a Microsoft computer scientist and a veteran of the supercomputer world, said the PlayStation supercomputer might find its best application as a computer for the large digital display walls that are used by the Defense Department.
Dr. Bell awards annual computing prizes that include a category for the best price/performance in high performance computing. "They should enter my contest," he said.
The supercomputing center scientists said they had chosen the PlayStation 2 because Sony sells a special Linux module that includes a high-speed network connection and a disk drive.
By contrast, it is almost impossible for researchers to install the Linux system on Microsoft's Xbox game console.
Using a network of machines is not a new concept in the supercomputing world. Linux, which plays a major role in that world, has been used to assemble high-performance parallel computers built largely out of commodity hardware components. These machines are generally called Beowulf clusters.
Hah! I said I still have the 800xl still set up. I started out with the Atari 400 (with the sealed plastic overlay keyboard) and the cassette recorder to load and save programs. Moved up to the 800 with the plug in RAM. I tried a 1200xl for a week but it sucked for some reason I can't recall and then switched to the 800xl. I've had it disassembled many times and it still plugs along. I even have 2 "Happy" upgrade chips in the 1050 drives which doubles their speed. I discovered the world of IBM PC and Apple IIe before I got sucked in to an Atari ST. At that point, I had no reason to stay with Atari for much of anything except nostalgia.
One of the first things I do when I'm vi'ing a file these days is type in :set number. Old ways die hard.
I bow to you. I came in right after they came up with the floppy drives. I remember one game, Picnic Paranoia, and it took about five minutes to load with the tape drive. When I got it for my floppy system and it booted up in less thirty seconds, I thought WOW! You know, considering you could get the entire Atari setup for less than a grand back then (800 computer, floppy drive, basic, Atariwriter, Star Raiders, etc), it was an excellent deal.
Deep pattern matching and discovery algorithms in their various guises. Data mining, financial modeling, real-time traffic analysis, etc. Databases of any type are another area that typically bottlenecks on the memory or I/O performance. We use a class of algorithms for this that are both very powerful and very fast (really the best stuff out there by a longshot), but which do honest-to-god random access of the entire physical address space. The only thing that stays in the processor cache is the code, because there are no tight CPU intensive loops but complex parallel pattern traversals. In other words, the processors spend most of their time waiting for bytes to come in from main memory. And with these types of tight dependencies, you can't use a cluster, so a really good ccNUMA implementation is the way to go.
A bunch of "slow" 1-GHz 64-bit integer cores with a Gbyte of attached primary memory each instead of tertiary or quaternary main memory is what I need, and would be orders of magnitude faster than the PCs we can get now. Lacking direct access to the entire physical address space, I'll take the fastest memory architecture I can get my hands on. Modern architectures, and PCs in particular fake a truly flat address space with layers upon layers of cache to make up for the slow memory.
I would note that many people think their applications are processor performance bound when they are actually memory performance bound. A stalled processor is still being "used", it just isn't doing anything, which is a mucher harder situation to diagnose from a casual glance at system monitors. It has been noted many times on supercomputing cluster mailing lists and similar that when they move applications to faster processors, the improvement in performance almost perfectly correlates with the increased memory performance of their new systems rather than the increased processor performance. The x86 architecture in particular has been at the memory wall for a while, though as I stated before it looks like AMDs HyperTransport system will give it a big (and much needed) scalability boost. I'm seriously considering Opteron systems for cheap horsepower once the OS builds stabilize for it and become properly optimized for it.
Dude, I "ain't" buying a Dell or Gateway or Compaq piece of junk, I'm getting a Playstation!
Oh wait! There are already two or three lying around the house!
Best regards,
Let me just say that I completely agree with you on the promise of the Opteron............and in far more ways than I can possibly discuss here. :)
Sony Might Have Gotten It Right with the PS3 from the Beginning
Softpedia | November 5th, 2007 | Filip Truta
Posted on 11/25/2007 1:38:14 PM EST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1930299/posts
WND Exclusive: Why Iraq’s buying up Sony PlayStation 2s
Source: World Net Daily
Published: December 19, 2000 Author: Joseph Farah
Posted on 12/19/2000 01:16:53 PST by Singapore_Yank
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a3f27852c0f.htm
Why Saddam Bought 1,400 Playstation 2 Toys
Source: Jai Links
Published: 12 21 00 Author: Jim Miklaszewski NBC
Posted on 12/22/2000 03:38:14 PST by oceanperch
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a433d26700d.htm
Abbie and the Probie will have a better graphics wall in the lab than the director has in her war room
“are we going to stop exports of PS2’s to China as they can all be tied together?”
How are “we”( the collective?) going to stop Sony, a JAPANESE PRIVATE COMPANY, from exporting to China or anywhere? and why should “we” have the power to do this to a private company anyway?
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