Discussion on:

PS3 supercomputer illustrates innovative IT cost savings

During the current economic downturn, organizations are turning to IT for innovative ways to cut costs. Several computer scientists have developed a unique money-saving technique?cluster Sony PlayStation 3 game systems into cheap supercomputers.

Original blog post:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/itdojo/?p=359

Have you come up with an innovative solution that?s saving your company money?

Some researchers from the U.S., Switzerland and the Netherlands Clustered 200 PS3's.... which helped them decrypt a md5 hash... interesting read http://playstation.joystiq.com/2008/12/30/researchers-use-ps3-cluster-to-reveal-internet-security-flaw/

I wrote an article about that for TechRepublic:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/networking/?p=776

I knew I saw it on here, I just couldn't remember where... Great read by the way... lol gave me a bit of a headache when I was reading about the "hash function background" (http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/)... but I pushed through

Using the TeraGrid doesn't cost the researcher money:
http://kb.iu.edu/data/axcj.html

Also, they aren't entirely interchangeable. It is good to have a variety of platforms, so I am glad this is out there, but it should be viewed as one option among many.

Anyway, if you are curious about this PS3 (Cell processor) work, try this paper:
http://www.netlib.org/netlib/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/scop3.pdf

A few years back I recall reading a shipment of PS2s had been intercepted on their way to Iraq. At the time it was violation of export law because they could be used in a "weapons of mass destruction" program.

I recall the article mentioned they could be clustered to make a "supercomputer," but the story fell dead swiftly and there was no follow up on the idea of clustering cheap processors to manifest "supercomputing."

Like a cat was let out of the bag but allowed to slink off quietly into the night.

So this has obviously been doable for a long while. Why are we hearing of this "first" now? Is it because the bad boys are designing nukes with wirelessly clustered Blackberries nowadays? Are 50 clustered NVidia graphics adapters calculating missile trajectories in North Korea at the moment?

How is this different than a 16 core server? I would think that building a server with 4 quad core processors would be in the same price range, provide a similar processing capability and be easier to manage.

Bill

Someone down the list mentioned video processors: NVIDIA has introduced the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, ~1Tflops for $10k. Check it out @ http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_supercomputing.html

Given that Sony are still more-or-less only breaking even at best on sales of the PS3 console itself, and rely on game sales for it to actually make money, the last thing they'll want are large numbers of PS3 consoles being bought which will never have a single game played on them.

Serves them right really for using a chip which was ill-suited to gaming from the start. The Cell processor (even in its 6 SPE available version in the PS3) is a very good middle-ground for a cheap HPC, between pure CPU architectures which are more flexible but relatively slow, and GPGPU usage which is still quite limited in scope but blazingly fast with what they can be made to do.

I suppose it isn't all bad news for Sony though. At least the sales figures for the PS3 won't be quite so bad as they are now, if they started being bought in bulk for HPC clusters. Even if they don't sell any games for them.

Some financial institutions offer online-only savings accounts. These usually pay higher interest rates and sometimes carry higher security restrictions.
Savings

Some financial institutions offer online-only savings accounts. These usually pay higher interest rates and sometimes carry higher security restrictions.
Savings