Playstation cluster creates cheap supercomputer

Linking gaming systems together is the answer, US professor says


Dr Gaurav Khanna, an astrophysicist, has been building his own supercomputer of sorts with the popular gaming console.

The professor has been renting time on supercomputers at NASA and the US National Science Foundation to run highly complicated calculations on the amount of radiation emitted when a black hole swallows a star. That supercomputing time, though, doesn't come easily or cheap, Khanna says. In an average year he rents about 30,000 hours, which costs US$20,000-$30,000, (NZ26,000-$39,000), a significant chunk of his grant money.

To ease his supercomputing plight, Khanna turned to the cell chip inside the Playstation 3 (PS3). By linking eight of them together, he says, he gets the same processing power as a supercomputer with 200 processors.




Khanna says the cell chip, which was collaboratively developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, is designed to have a single processor and eight compute engines, making it more powerful than dual-core or even quad-core chips. The engines don't handle input/output and don't talk to the keyboard, mouse or memory, but they do raw computations very, very fast, according to Khanna.

"It has a unique design. It has a lot more potential — a better processor in my opinion," he says. "What's unique is that they made it an open platform. Normally with a game console, the maker controls who can run what on it. What Sony did was make the PS3 an open platform. They let you run whatever you want on it. It has the full capabilities of a normal computer. You can run Firefox or whatever you want. It gave me the possibility of doing whatever I want with it."

Dan Olds, an analyst with the Gabriel Consulting, says this is the type of technology that IT managers should be keeping an eye on.

"It sounds like a real wild thing and people will wonder why the hell it works," says Olds. "It works because that particular video game processor is a supercomputer processor. It will scream on the right kinds of workloads. The things that make it really good for video game processing make it good on certain processing-intensive workloads. This would be good for doing highly parallel processor-intensive analysis, taking on a big bunch of numbers, big calculations.


Olds points out that IBM has already picked up on this capability and integrated the cell chip into its QS20 BladeCenter product. An update to that — the QS21— shipped recently. IBM noted that the QS21 is focused on companies that create and run highly visual, graphic and immersive real-time applications like 3D rendering, compression and encryption.

"We're starting to move into an era where your average company can get supercomputing power," says Olds.

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