Posted on 12/23/2008 8:55:54 AM PST by ShadowAce
I mentioned this article to a hardware tech head here at work. He simply said “Just eight? Amateurs”.
Some amazing info re: PS3 and Folding@Home
PlayStation 3
The PlayStation 3’s Life With PlayStation client replaced the Folding@home application on 18 September 2008.
Stanford announced in August 2006 that a folding client was available to run on the Sony PlayStation 3.[22] The intent was that gamers would be able to contribute to the project by merely “contributing electricity”, leaving their PlayStation 3 consoles running the client while not playing games. PS3 firmware version 1.6 (released on Thursday, March 22, 2007) allows for Folding@home software, a 50 MB download, to be used on the PS3.[2] A peak output of the project at 990 teraFLOPS was achieved on 25 March 2007, at which time the number of FLOPS from each PS3 as reported by Stanford fell, reducing the overall speed rating of those machines by 50%. This had the effect of bumping down the overall project speed to the mid 700 range and increasing the number of active PS3s required to achieve a petaFLOPS level to around 60,000.
On April 26, 2007, Sony released a new version of Folding@home which improved folding performance drastically, such that the updated PS3 clients produced 1500 teraFLOPS with 52,000 clients versus the previous 400 teraFLOPS by around 24,000 clients.[23] Lately, the console accounts for around 40% of all teraFLOPS at an approximate ratio of 35½ PS3 clients per teraFLOPS.
On December 19, 2007, Sony again updated the Folding@home client to version 1.3 to allow users to run music stored on their hard drives while contributing. Another feature of the 1.3 update allows users to automatically shut down their console after current work is done or after a limited period of time (for example 3 or 4 hours). Also, the software update added the Generalized Born implicit solvent model, so the FAH PS3 client gained more broad computing capabilities.[24][25] Shortly afterward, 1.3.1 was released to solve a mishandling of protocol resulting in difficulties sending and receiving Work Units due to heavy server loads stemming from the fault.
On 18 September 2008 the Folding@home client became Life With PlayStation. In addition to the existing functionality, the application also provides the user with access to information “channels”, the first of which being the Live Channel which offers news headlines and weather through a 3D globe. The user can rotate and zoom in to any part of the world to access information provided by Google News and The Weather Channel, among other sources, all running whilst folding in the background. This update also provided more advanced simulation of protein folding and a new ranking system.[26]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding_@Home
Also:
The Folding@home computing cluster currently operates at above 4 petaFLOPS at all times, with a large majority of the performance coming from PlayStation 3 and GPU clients.[2] (4.61 petaFLOPS, as of December 20, 2008.) In comparison to this, the fastest standalone supercomputer (non-distributive computing) in the world (as of November 2008, U.S. DOE’s Jaguar) peaks at approximately 1.64 petaFLOPS.[17]
Here’s the increase in petaflops for Folding@Home:
petaFLOP Barrier Date Crossed
1.0 September 16, 2007
2.0 early May 2008
3.0 August 20, 2008
4.0 September 28, 2008
And they would seriously succeed, if they can read and follow instructions. Any competent 11-12 year old should be able to build a cluster. And learn a lot, doing it.
/johnny
Next article will be “How the Sony Playstation” was used to create China’s Super Computer Network and bring down the West.”
They’ve already taken apart enough stuff around here over the years! ;)
You got stock in Teradata? Work for them?
:-)
Minor nit-pick correction/clarification: The Cell in the PS3 is made with 1 PowerPC processor core and 8 SIMD cores, but one of the latter is disbled for yield considerations. Of the remaining 1+7, one SIMD core is always reserved for the PS3 system, so Linux on a PS3 this way gets you 1 PowerPC core plus 6 SIMD cores.
But it does get good -- PS3 calculations in linear fashion. Instead of taking a large task and letting each core do its work, the PS3 is also really good at taking a large task, dividing it into six or so discrete processing steps, and then streaming the job linearly through all the cores, each doing its work towards the final result. Kind of like deep pipelining with multiple processors. Cool, huh?
Can they afford seven more of the things?
Good luck with that.
“Minor nit-pick correction/clarification:”
I wasn’t aware of the additional processor for redundancy :-)!!!! I didn’t know they did this in multi-core processors in general :-)! Is this mainly due to yield issues of the local high speed memory for each processor? I am aware that some designers make SRAM cells in a silicon process with smaller gates in the SRAM cell in an effort to increase memory density (most FPGAs are designed like this). Of course, since you are violating some rules doing this, the probability of your yield w/o redundancy goes up.
That’s rather slick how that pipelining works! I have some experience with network processors (nothing substantial) and the Cell seems very similar to these devices (the IXP line of processors for example). I always wanted to do something like a Cell in an FPGA (of course, it’d never be useful....just fun to experiment with).
One quick question....does the PS3 have dedicated graphics hardware? I am too lazy to check this out on
And to answer my own question, yes the PS3 has a dedicated graphics processor too :-)!
I was a little concerned about that.
I’m sure the playstation isn’t on the “do not export” list,
and something like this could give a huge leg up to countries that mean us ill.
I've got a couple of 8X4 clusters at work and I get the same response.
How about Global Thermonuclear War.
Not redundancy. The PowerPC is a general-purpose core mainly intended to be the traffic controller for the SIMD cores. They could have shipped them all with 8 SIMD cores, but then what to do with all the processors where an error was found on only one core? That's a lot to throw away. So they set the standard at 7 so an error on only one core is acceptable. If all 8 are good it doesn't cost anything to blow a fuse to disable one of the cores to keep to the standard. That probably increased the number of available chips quite a bit and dropped the price.
I have some experience with network processors (nothing substantial) and the Cell seems very similar to these devices
You'll probably be happy to know that "Cell" is short for "Cell Broadband Engine Architecture." It was designed to stream just as with a network processor. Toshiba has one decoding and resizing a huge number of simultaneous video streams in a demo flat-screen display.
One quick question....does the PS3 have dedicated graphics hardware?
Yes, not too hot by today's standards, something around a GeForce 7-series. But then it only needs to push out max 1920x1080, while these days a graphics card is expected to push out up to twice as many pixels.
Not on the measly allowance I hand out, LOL!
You want something besides food, shelter and clothing, Kid? Get a job. :)
“I wasn’t aware of the additional processor for redundancy
Not redundancy. The PowerPC is a general-purpose core mainly intended to be the traffic controller for the SIMD cores.”
That’s basically what I meant :-)! I used to design embedded SRAM a while back and we’d put “redundant rows” of cells in SRAM with a laser blown fuse should we find errored rows. All the fuse did was shift address decoding around the errors.
I know they do this in FPGAs as well....it’s fundamentally a huge SRAM :-)!
I regularly install clusters of hundreds of cores. The largest I helped install was 4416 cores. It's currently #64, though when we installed it, it was #17.
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