Cheapest supercomputer ever - 8 PS3s hooked up together
By Dave Parrack
The PS3 may not be living up to it’s reputation as a revolutionary and ultra powerful games machine, but it is good for one thing, at least if you have 8 of the damn things and enough computing knowledge to hook them all up together to create a supercomputer.
Both Dr. Frank Mueller of the North Carolina State University and Gaurav Khanna, at the University of Massachusetts have proven that Kaz Hirai’s claims that the PS3 is a supercomputer are actually somewhat true, by linking 8 of the beasts together.
Khanna told ComputerWorld:
“For $4,000 or so, I can get eight PS3s that can do the same task that I’d do on a supercomputer,”
“For a one-time cost, I have this resource I can use privately. I can use it indefinitely over and over again. That’s hugely attractive. That’s why I considered the project. I have my own supercomputer right here. There’s no elaborate process for getting time. There’s no waiting. It’s just mine.”
Khanna claims that the PS3 cluster can compute calculations in a day which would take him a year to work out on a typical desktop computer. It all boils down to the Cell chip inside the PS3 which is more powerful than dual core and even new quad core chips. The raw computing power of the jointly developed Sony, IBM and Toshiba chip is huge.
Mueller meanwhile, credited with creating the first PS3 cluster, constructed his supercomputer for just $5000, a fraction of the cost a traditional machine with a similar high perfomance number crunching capability would come to.
He also claims that linking 10,000 of the Sony machines together would create the fastest computer in the world, beating the current leader called BlueGene/L, which is a 130,000 processor behemoth at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Maybe that should be the new aim for Sony? The PS3 certainly isn’t doing much good as a games machine at the moment so how about making affordable supercomputing the new push for the hardware instead.
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October 30th, 2007
[...] Forest University Cheapest supercomputer ever - 8 PS3s hooked up together » This Summary is from an article posted at TECH.BLORGE.com on Monday, October 29, 2007 This [...]
October 30th, 2007
This is isn’t anything new, really. Several years ago a group of people did the same thing with PS2’s. The story is neat, but the publicity and discussion is boring. If and when the PS4 comes out, I’m sure we’ll see a story very similar to this one.