Posted on 12/23/2008 8:55:54 AM PST by ShadowAce
(PhysOrg.com) -- UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide to building a home-brewed supercomputer that can reduce the cost of university and general computing research.
Found at http://www.ps3cluster.org , the resource fully illustrates how to create a fully functioning and high performance supercomputer with the Sony Playstation 3.
Last year, Khanna’s construction of a small supercomputer using eight Sony-donated Playstation 3 gaming consoles made headlines nationwide in the scientific community. On the consoles, he is solving complex equations designed to predict the properties of gravitational waves generated by the black holes located at the center of the galaxies.
“Science budgets have been significantly dropping over the last decade,” Khanna said. “Here’s a way that people can do science projects less expensively. This new web site will show people how to move forward.”
Typically, scientists rent supercomputer time by the hour. A single simulation can cost more than 5,000 hours at $1 per hour on the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid computing infrastructure. “For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer and it works just as well if not better,” Khanna said. “Plus, you can use it over and over again, indefinitely.” The cost for his initial Playstation grid was $4,000.
The guide is freely available to the public under an open source license.
The Cluster Workshop project is partially funded by the National Science Foundation and was first announced and demonstrated at the 2nd Annual Georgia Tech, Sony/Toshiba/IBM Workshop on Software and Applications for the Cell/B.E. Processor.
“This opens up a huge door to partnerships with industry and other universities,” said Khanna, noting that the UMass Dartmouth College of Engineering has an interest and focus in simulation sciences. Tyco Electronics (through the UMass Dartmouth Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center in Fall River), Sony, Terra Soft Solutions and IBM are among the companies already involved with this effort. The scientists are seeking input from industry members and researchers to determine future project direction.
“We hope to continue to bring supercomputing to a broader audience by providing tools that simplify the use of these systems,” said Poulin, who specializes in distributed pattern recognition and artificial intelligence.
Good. That’ll give my boys something to do during Christmas Break... ;)
(I’m not showing them this; they seriously WOULD try to do it!)
Abate me of my ignorance. This is an example of “parallel processing”?
Great, SKYNET first powers on at a Circuit City by a bunch of bored soon to be unemployed workers...
SkyNet self-assembles
China’s military thanks the scientists.
Yes. Parallel processing is taking smaller chunks of a task, and completing those chunks in parallel on separate cores. Those cores could be on the same machine, or separate machines, connected by some sort of network.
“Would you like to play a game?”
“Abate me of my ignorance. This is an example of “parallel processing”?”
Yep. The PS3 has 8 processor cores in it. As a simple example, suppose one wanted to compute the gravitational forces between 8 bodies. You can divy up all of the computations required and assign them to each of the processors. The processors can then compute the partial results and report back to a host as results become available. So, instead of a single processor doing all of the computations in a linear fashion, it can break the problem up into smaller tasks that can be handled by each processor in parallel.
I hope they use this to make Warhawk flight more realistic ;-)!!!!
Owl_Eagle
“When the stock market crashed,
Franklin Roosevelt got on the television
and didn’t just talk about
the princes of greed, he said,
‘Look, here’s what happened.’"
-Slow Joe Biden
LOL! SirKit and I like that one!
Yeah, all supercomputers use parallel processing. If you couple that with a parallel processing data base like Teradata you can do amazing things.
At 4Ghz 256 GFLOPS, ne'er do wells have been using PSIIIs for password-cracking for a while. Those 8 core processors are really fast.
This is great! I’ve been designing- I mean, a friend is designing a nuclear implosion bomb. Doing the neutronics calculations on a PC is slow (takes about 100 hours of core time to compute a nanosecond of “real” time)! With a parallel processor made up of PS-3s I bet I can get MCNP to run 100 times faster!
(This is why it was such a big deal when the USA (Algor) shipped a Cray supercomputer to China “for industrial purposes only” and it somehow got diverted to a military research lab. And the next thing you know, legacy nuclear codes go missing from Los Alamos...).
Where can I buy one?
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