Scientists Write Guide to Build Supercomputer from Sony Playstation 3

Physorg.com ^ | 17 December 2008 | University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

[ShadowAce]

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Good. That’ll give my boys something to do during Christmas Break... ;)

(I’m not showing them this; they seriously WOULD try to do it!)

[sinanju]

Abate me of my ignorance. This is an example of “parallel processing”?

[Abathar]

Great, SKYNET first powers on at a Circuit City by a bunch of bored soon to be unemployed workers...

[NonValueAdded]

SkyNet self-assembles

[Yo-Yo]

China’s military thanks the scientists.

[ShadowAce]

This is an example of “parallel processing”?

Yes. Parallel processing is taking smaller chunks of a task, and completing those chunks in parallel on separate cores. Those cores could be on the same machine, or separate machines, connected by some sort of network.

[Cooter]

How the PS3 Helped Build the World's Fastest Supercomputer

[ClearCase_guy]

“Would you like to play a game?”

[edh]

“Abate me of my ignorance. This is an example of “parallel processing”?”

Yep. The PS3 has 8 processor cores in it. As a simple example, suppose one wanted to compute the gravitational forces between 8 bodies. You can divy up all of the computations required and assign them to each of the processors. The processors can then compute the partial results and report back to a host as results become available. So, instead of a single processor doing all of the computations in a linear fashion, it can break the problem up into smaller tasks that can be handled by each processor in parallel.

I hope they use this to make Warhawk flight more realistic ;-)!!!!

[agere_contra]

Some self-assembly required. But the result is worth it :0)

[End Times Sentinel]

It could have a hundred super computers, I'll still never get where Niko gets to exact revenge on Dimitri in Grand Theft Auto IV.

Owl_Eagle

“When the stock market crashed,
Franklin Roosevelt got on the television
and didn’t just talk about
the princes of greed, he said,
‘Look, here’s what happened.’"
-Slow Joe Biden

[SuziQ]

LOL! SirKit and I like that one!

[COBOL2Java]

Scientists Write Guide to Build Supercomputer from Sony Playstation 3

[Maelstorm]

Yeah, all supercomputers use parallel processing. If you couple that with a parallel processing data base like Teradata you can do amazing things.

[Seven plus One]

I hope they use this to make Warhawk flight more realistic ;-)!!!!

At 4Ghz 256 GFLOPS, ne'er do wells have been using PSIIIs for password-cracking for a while. Those 8 core processors are really fast.

[DBrow]

This is great! I’ve been designing- I mean, a friend is designing a nuclear implosion bomb. Doing the neutronics calculations on a PC is slow (takes about 100 hours of core time to compute a nanosecond of “real” time)! With a parallel processor made up of PS-3s I bet I can get MCNP to run 100 times faster!

(This is why it was such a big deal when the USA (Algor) shipped a Cray supercomputer to China “for industrial purposes only” and it somehow got diverted to a military research lab. And the next thing you know, legacy nuclear codes go missing from Los Alamos...).

[chuckles]

All this is great, but look what they had to do just to get Pi. You can't ask questions of it easily, so it takes a programmer to give it a problem to solve. It doesn't even have a GUI. How will we download porn any faster? I don't want my women in ASCII. This is why we got crummy science in the global warming debacle. Some coke bottle glasses guy put the wrong numbers in from Nova Scotia at 3am and messed everything up while playing WOW.

[BenLurkin]

Where can I buy one?