Creating A Supercomputer from Playstations

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Why is this new? While it is cute, so??? djf



> Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 16:05:34 -0400
> From: Gerald Ballman <ballman () usna edu>
>
>
>
> http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/3/2003/05/27/story002.html
>
> Creating A Supercomputer from Playstations
>
> By John Markoff,
>
> NY Times/CNET News -- As perhaps the clearest
> evidence yet of the power of sophisticated but
> inexpensive 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 devices.
>
> The resulting system, with components purchased at
> retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000.
> Researchers at the supercomputing center 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 PS2 that was
> originally intended to move and transform
> pixels rapidly on a television screen to
> produce lifelike graphics.
>
> That 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
> 1980s, 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 PCs, is now selling a high-performance 
> graphics card capable of
> executing 51 billion mathematical operations per 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--32MB 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.
>
> 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's 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.
>
> -----


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