Playstation three, Xbox and Nintendo Wii have charmed a generation of computer gameplayers with bold graphics and rapid-fire animation. But these high tech toys can do a load more than just play games. At North Carolina State Varsity,, using the power of the new PS3 to form a high-powered computing environment for a small part of the price of the supercomputers on the market. Mueller, an associate professor of PC science, has constructed a supercomputing cluster capable of both high spec computing and running the newest in PC gaming. His cluster of 8 PS3 machines the first such educational cluster in the world packs the power of a tiny supercomputer, but at a total cost of roughly $5,000, it costs less than some desktop PCs that have only a small part of the computing power. Clusters are not new to the computing world, Mueller says. Google, the stockmarket, auto design firms and scientists use clusters, but this is the 1st educational computing cluster made from Playstation 3s.
Systematic computing is just number crunching, which the PS3s are superb at given the Cell processor and employing them in a cluster, Mueller says. At this time one limitation is the 256 megabyte RAM memory restriction, but it may be feasible to retrofit more RAM.
Another problem lies in limited speed for double-precision calculations needed by systematic applications, but news for the next-generation Cell processor address this issue. In the computing world there's a list of the top five hundred fastest computers, Mueller says. Now the quickest is BlueGene / L, a supercomputer with over 130,000 processors at Lawrence Livermore State Lab . The PS3 cluster at NC State doesn't break into the top 5 hundred, but Mueller estimates that with roughly ten thousand PS3 machines anybody could create the quickest PC in the world even though with little single-precision capacities and networking inhibitions. The PS3 permits the Linux OS to be installed, and IBM designed the programming environment for programming the Cell processor ( including 8 vectorization units ), which mixed incredible computing power inside a single PS3.
Each PS3 unit contains 6 operational special-purpose cores for number crunching and one general-purpose core that's two-way multithreaded in his configuration, so that the 8 machines clustered have 64 logical processors, providing lots of number-crunching capability as well as running the most recent games. Jan. Three is the 'birthdate' of this cluster, Mueller says.
Of course, here at NC State we'll use it for academic purposes and for research. We are working with scientists to pinpoint the needs and how our cluster may be employed to their benefit, and our PC science faculty is using the cluster to educate classes in operating systems, with parallel systems, compilers and gaming sure to follow.