Posted on 05/26/2003 6:27:15 AM PDT by Lessismore
As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the computing power of sophisticated but inexpensive video-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's.
The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000. The center's researchers 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 Sony video-game console that was originally intended to move and transform pixels rapidly on a television screen to produce lifelike graphics. The 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 1980's, 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 personal computers, is now selling a high-performance graphics card that is capable of executing 51 billion mathematical operations a 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 — 32 megabytes 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.
Dr. 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 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.
Seriously, this is quite cool. From those crappy Atari's we all bought 15 years ago to this. Holy cow!
A couple weeks ago I ran across an article that discussed how the advances in video chip technology are being harnessed to move into a new realm of supercomputing. There are some fascinating applications being discussed. If I can dig up the URL I'll post it.
Limited hardware fosters good programming. Programmers used to work wonders on DEC PDP-11s; even the Timex Sinclair had a pretty good BASIC on it. Try and find someone who can hand-code in assembly language any more...
On the other hand, give a programmer 100GB on the hard drive, 512MB of RAM, and 2 MHz of processor speed, and what do you get? Applications written in Visual Basic.
I am typing this on a PC that uses an 800MHz bus, dual 400MHz DDR ram, a 3.06GHz Hyperthreaded 800MHz FSB P4C, Intel 875 Chipset, gigabit ethernet, Radeon 9800 Pro vid card, and dual Viewsonic VX900 19" flat screen monitors.
All of this power is driven not by military or scientific computing. This rapid increase is driven by GAMING and Gamers.
Check out this guy. I've been using Steve Gibson's stuff since Spinrite 1 and he's good.
His site has all kinds of excellent info and is a great place to test your firewall to see if it's really tight.
Capitalism? Where did they get the $50,000 to do this?
Gee, what a surprise! I wonder if Microsoft knows about this little problem. I'm sure their tech support people will get right on it....
January second of last year, Bush signed an Executive Order allowing more powerful computers to be exported. Many on the right went ballistic. Bush was just like Clinton! Selling out to BIG BUSINESS and arming our enemies!
The Bush EO alllowed the export of any computer capable of under 190,000 MTOP (Millions of Theoretcial Operations Per Second).
This Sony Playstation cluster is capable of 500,000 MTOPS.
My belief is that holographs have the potential to transform commerce, communications and life in general.They could be the "next big thing."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.