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.
You are comparing a multi CPU Origin 3800/3900 cluster supercomputer to an Intel based workstation. Hmmmm... yea sure!
Hey! I love my Atari 800xl!
I still have it set up with two 1050 5¼" floppy drives daisy chained, ready to run any one of 400 titles of the greatest software from the '80s.
No, SGI lost any supremacy on the graphics desktop they ever had quite a while ago. The only advantage.......the ONLY advantage.........a UNIX-based workstation has any more is memory addressability. Certain apps. need to deal with very large datasets, and Windows is pretty much limited to 2GB of memory and Linux can be stretched to just under 4GB of memory on IA-32 architecture systems. However, that will change and change fast with x86/64 processors.
FYI, I could build a system right now with a decent sized Linux cluster........with IA-32 systems, mind you.........and the proper "hard-wired frame buffer" (not yet commercially available) that could mop the floor with a $1 million + Onyx with beaucoup pipes at a fraction of the cost.
Huh? Only on low- to mid-end Unix workstations, and even then only for the narrow range of high-performance applications that only tax the CPU and no other part of the system. For the rest of us who don't do ridiculously CPU-bound computation, the overall bus and memory architecture performance (both in terms of latency and bandwidth) have a far greater impact on application performance than the CPU. While many people talk about GFLOPS as a metric for supercomputers, most people actually requiring general purpose supercomputers use STREAM type metrics that profile memory and I/O performance to evaluate these systems. I would remind you that even the smaller x86 SGI boxes use a crossbar switch rather than a bus for I/O.
Sure, for rendering x86 gives killer bang for the buck. But rendering generates a very atypical system resource load that doesn't apply to most other applications you need a beefy box for. On high-end x86 systems, my CPUs mostly sit idle waiting for data to squeeze through the memory bottleneck. AMDs HyperTransport will be a big step up in this regard and will help narrow the current chasm between high-end commodity x86 and high-end Unix systems.
Real Big Iron non-cluster supercomputers are notable more for their I/O and memory bandwidth/capacity than their CPU capacity. When you can find me an x86 motherboard that will give me anywhere near 25 Gbytes/sec of memory bandwith, you let me know. I'll be the first one in line.
XL? Newbie. I had the original 800 with 48k of RAM, 300 baud modem and Atari Basic.
I never did get used to programing without line numbering.
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