Playstation 2 Linux Cluster at NCSA

Mr. Spock writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is looking at scientific computing on the Sony Playstation 2. They've set up a cluster with 65 compute nodes. They're running Linux for Playstation 2. What will they think of next?"

More info

[cascino (454769)]

More info on the processing power of the PS2 as applied to computational chemistry. [uiuc.edu]
Basically, this study shows the PS2 has roughly the computational linear algebra power of a PIII-600 (the then fastest processor on the market).

Re:More info

[nukey56 (455639)]

Quote from the parent's article: Furthermore, the GNU compilers we used do not employ the vector units on the Emotion Engine processor.

I would suspect this particular cluster would bypass these benchmarks dramatically, because they are making use of the most powerful unit in the system.

Re:More info

[jean-guy69 (445459)]

ahem... not exactly if you read carefully:

45MFLOPS, which is better than the 36MFLOPS obtained for the Intel machine using assembler that has been heavily optimized. If anything, this performance estimate is conservative in favor of the PS2, because our primary goal was a working assembly dot product in macromode and we have made no attempt to optimize the code. For example, our code uses only three of the VPU registers, and a speedup of up to 4x (the latency of the floating point multiply instruction) may be obtained by using all of the available registers.

so, using *unoptimized* ASM on PS2, PS2 is 25% faster that the intel machine using *heavily optimized* ASM.. and optimizing code would probably earn BIG performance gains (400% !?) on the PS2.

taking the sentence the the letter there is a potential of 500 % the speed of the PIII 600 on the PS2 for this particular calculation.

Wow!

[d3kk (644538)]

Imagine a cluster of...

Oh.

imagine..

[by Anonymous Coward]

imagine two thirds of the comments mentioning a beowulf cluster of something!

oh wait..

Re:imagine..

[Oriumpor (446718)]

Yes.... so you get modded down.... for being right... happens a lot

Well.

[Pres. Ronald Reagan (659566)]

This seems like a fairly expensive way to make a cluster. $200 for each PS2 and $200 for each Linux kit? That comes out to $26,000. You could buy computers with more RAM and faster processors (than a 400MHz MIPS) for about the same amount.

Re:Well.

[praksys (246544)]

Judging from the abstract [nsf.gov] it looks like they plan to take advantage of the PS2's ability to handle graphics. I doubt if you could get a PC that could handle graphics as well as a PS2 for under $400.

Re:Well.

[htmlboy (31265)]

This seems like a fairly expensive way to make a cluster. $200 for each PS2 and $200 for each Linux kit? That comes out to $26,000. You could buy computers with more RAM and faster processors (than a 400MHz MIPS) for about the same amount.

the benefit comes with problems that can be highly optimized to work on the ps2's vector processor. for pure vector operation, the graphics system in the ps2 provides better bang for the buck than chips with less specific capabilities. it doesn't do much, but what it does, it does it pretty quickly.

Re:Well.

[Henry Stern (30869)]

US$26k for a cluster is DIRT cheap. The prof next door to my supervisor made a 32-node Xeon cluster last year for a modest $125k by using commodity parts, an extraordinary feat of frugality. Most new clusters used for scientific computing cost US$500k or more.

Unfortunately for me, the kind of work that I like to do does not easily fit into a node with only 32MB of memory. This rules out any excuse I could have to apply for a grant to build a desk out of a cluster of PS2s. ;)

damn you!

[by Anonymous Coward]

What do we have left to imagine _now_?

Is this legal?

[BitterOak (537666)]

I know Microsoft claims XBox modding is a DMCA violation. Is any modding necessary to put Linux on the PS2?

If so, this could be a great DMCA test case, since NCSA is a respectable organization, and would present a much more sympathetic case in court. Even if they don't go after NCSA, others could use it as an example.

XBox modders, for instance, claiming substantial non-infringing uses could point to the NCSA PS2 cluster as an example.

Re:Is this legal?

[cascino (454769)]

Sony themselves sell the kit. No problem.
(Then again, I suppose Sony has been known to sue itself in the past...)

Re:Is this legal?

[JohnCub (56178)]

Sony sells the linux kit for ps2. So I'm guessing they are saying it is ok to put linux on your ps2.

http://www.us.playstation.com/hardware/more/SCPH -9 7047.asp

Linux (for PlayStation®2)

The Linux kit (for PlayStation 2) allows you to use the versatility of the GNU Linux operating system with the power of your PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system as a fully functional desktop computer!

• The Linux Kit (for PlayStation 2) includes:
• Linux Kit (for PlayStation 2) release 1.0 software
  
• Monitor Cable Adaptor (for PlayStation 2) (with Audio Connectors)
  
• Internal Hard Disk Drive (40 GB) (for PlayStation 2)
  
• Network Adaptor (Ethernet) (for PlayStation 2) [10/100 Base-T]
  
• USB Keyboard (for PlayStation 2) & USB Mouse (for PlayStation 2)

~$200

Re:Is this legal?

[Dunark (621237)]

ok.. I am so sick of seeing this.. the xbox modding may or may not be a 'DMCA violation' but that is not the point.. xbox modding is ILLEGAL in any country with even the most basic of electronic intellectual property laws as you are using an ILLEGALLY modified BIOS image.. so please, stop acting as if it is evil of the microsoft oppressors to be claiming this as so.. so believe what you want, but unless you are using cromwell, xbox modding on the most basic level is equivalent to piracy

Just out of curios

Unfortunately...

[dfn5 (524972)]

the nodes started competing with each other and yelling "w00t w00t". In the end no work got done.

Cheap, easy (erm..) and powerful

[valisk (622262)]

Seems like a nice use for the playstation2 and rather nice of Sony to provide a Linux kit for the machine, it is a bit expensive though but I imagine it is quite a bit cheaper than a cluster of comprable SGI Mips boxes. In fact it wouldn't surprise me to find out that this cluster cost less than a single SGI Workstation.
Looks like cash strapped science labs all around the world may soon be rolling in CPU cycles on a failover cluster built of Kids game consoles and Linux, and the heavy duty workstation manufacturers will see their stock slip even further.

Reminds me of this cartoon

[muon1183 (587316)]

This reminds me of an episode of one of the cartoons I read. Written by a Nuclear Engineering PhD at Berkeley, the strip is quite funny. Here is the one this reminds me of [nukees.com].

What's next?

[questamor (653018)]

What will they think of next?

Probably clusters of just about any cheap all-identical hardware. It seems to suit the concept of clustering well. Sony have already done all the marketing and hardware price cutting to get the machines out there and used, while subsidising that cost with the games they sell. They'll only get cheaper. On top of that, they're identical systems that'll stay pretty much the same for the next 2-3 years. Good for spares in the future when three of your boxes have worn out, and the pet rat belonging to professor sieslak upstairs has pissed in two.

Sounds good to me!

Next step

[by Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they got this idea from Slashdot. Then it's easy to predict what they will do with their cluster. They will render a picture of Natali Portman, naked and petrified.

No performance info...

[StandardCell (589682)]

...but a group from UIUC [uiuc.edu] says:

We have also investigated the impact of vector size on performance. The EE processor is tailor-made for 4-element vectors, so one could expect performance degradation for longer vectors. In fact, the opposite is found - a consequence of the pipelining built into the VPU. Performance improvement stops once the vectors reach length 16, consistent with the rather shallow pipelines used in the VPU. In Figure 5, we compare the performance of the PIII-600 and Playstation 2 for 32-element single-precision vector dot products. The absolute performance for smaller datasets now tops 150MFLOPS for both the EE and PIII processors. Curiously, one sees a performance hit on the EE once the dataset exceeds 5 million vectors. This is almost certainly a consequence of the small amount of memory available on the PS2.

So, I have two question:

1. What are the performance stats of the cluster in the /. story?

2. Why would you bother when you could use current commodity hardware for much less? I mean, a P3-600 is interesting, but you could probably drop some Duron 1.4s with a basic mobo and 256MB RAM for less out the door than a PS2. (Note: I'm only asking, please clarify if you have a better idea of what's going on).

Re:No performance info...

[SanLouBlues (245548)]

The real reason for using consoles is that this cluster has a higher resale value, so when the project is done, they can make some of their money back.

Re:No performance info...

[bobbozzo (622815)]

1. What are the performance stats of the cluster in the /. story?

320 MFlops on matrix ops. Not great, but they say it's capable of 900 if they can feed the VPU fast enough. They think they can use additional existing hardware in the CPU to increase memory performance.

2. Why would you bother when you could use current commodity hardware for much less? I mean, a P3-600 is interesting, but you could probably drop some Duron 1.4s with a basic mobo and 256MB RAM for less out the door than a PS2.

Maybe. Wal-Mart sells Durons (with Lindows) for $199 complete, sans monitor.

But, apparently PS2's are under $100 according to another poster.

ISTM that they may be spending a lot of time figuring out how to optimize code for the PS2 though.

Playstation 2 Linux

[by Anonymous Coward]

Apparantly this runs on Sony's own version of Linux

See more about it here: http://playstation2-linux.com/ [playstation2-linux.com]

Maybe an XBox port in the future? :)

Cost Effective

[Arc04 (601196)]

Are PS2s more cost effective than other competitors? eg cheap x86 linux boxes.

Surely Walmart PCs must give more bang for the buck, but are PS2s going to be more stable? What do you guys think??

Arc

Linear price declines, exponetial performance gain

[SpikeSpiff (598510)]

The issue with using game hardware, especially "older" platforms, is that the price can not come down as fast as overall computing performance can increase.

This means that the cheapness of stable platforms can not compete with innovative platforms.

The real question is whether the administration and maintentance benefits of a homogenous and stable platform outweigh the higher cost of processing power.

I suspect that we will see a step function between rapidly and smoothly improving Dell boxes and occassional huge leaps on game platforms.

We've investigated GameCube clusters too.

[Samir Gupta (623651)]

At Nintendo, we've been excited about clustering applications of game consoles as well, and we've pursued a active program of research within our company.

Internally, we've experimented with large clusters of GameCubes to handle applications such as online games where various game entities in the universe can be logically decomposed into discrete units and processes running on each node of the cluster. This provides a more natural and robust organization to the traditinal setup of a few massive servers, since if one server crashes, it may bring down large parts of the game universe. In our setup, if a node fails, it might affect one NPC at worst, which another node will take over in due time.

While our investigation has targetted the needs of games in mind, I'm excited about using them for sheer computation, since the cost/MIPS of a game console is far less than traditional mainframe, supercomputing, or even PC platforms, and we are in preliminary talks with some large Japanese universities to experiment with using the GameCube as a compute unit.

While I must admit I'm sort of biased :-), we believe that our GameCube makes a superior clustering platform compared to the PS2, computationally (higher CPU speed), physically (its smaller size and form factor, less heat dissapation) and financially (lower unit cost).

Our future game consoles will likely support clustering "out of the box", with expansion as easy as hooking them together, allowing games, such as FPSes, or AI-heavy games like the Sim* series, to seamlessly evolve with the greater "virtual" CPU and memory resources that a cluster provides.

Re:We've investigated GameCube clusters too.

[virtigex (323685)]

The key thing with the PS2 is that Sony provides a Linux implementation, enabling one to run the huge library of open source code. They also provide APIs for some game specific functions.

Would Nintendo do the same? Any edge in performance would be negated by any restrictions associated with proprietary software. On the other hand, I'm sure that the open source community would greatly welcome either a Linux implementation (or documentation enabling an implementation) on the GameCube.

You don't exist

[shepd (155729)]

At least not on the internet.

Nein [google.ca] for google.

One EXTREMELY LAME [google.ca] hit from deja. Surprisingly, the sig is identical.

Until you show some credentials (as in a link to nintendo's site, with a page with AT LEAST your name on it), you don't exist.

In fact, it appears your department doesn't exist [google.ca].

Heck, where's your thesis, at least?

I find it neat, though, that you went from being Head of New Technology Research at SEGA straight to being Head of New Technology Research at Nintendo. More amazing, though, is that both companies have exactly the same departments!

More interesting:

<[e-mail]>:
Sorry, I couldn't find any host named research.sega.jp. (#5.1.2)

Look, provide me a page at nintendo.co.jp with your name on it, and everything will be sorted out.

Otherwise, this is:

Bill Gates,
Microsoft Founder
Redmond

Signing off.

Drat Saddam, a mad dastard

[frankthechicken (607647)]

Dammit, so what the hell kind of results was Saddam getting with his 4000 Playstations [theregister.co.uk] then. Must have been a hell of a lot of emotion coming out of that goddamn cluster.

Went something like this

[djupedal (584558)]

[bzzzzz.....bzzzzzzz....bzzzzz....click]
Hello, this is ToysRUs, how may I direct your call, please?
... I'd like to speak to someone about buying some...umm... Sony PlayStations, thanks.
Hello...this is the electronic games dept. What can I help you with?
... Yes, I need to purchase 100 Sony Playstation 2's...how many do you have in stock right now?
Let me check. Hold on, please.
Thank you for holding, Sir, we have 422 PS 2's in the back. Would you like those gift wrapped?
... No thanks...just put them aside, and we'll be down before closing time to pick them up, thanks.
Thank you for calling ToysRUs! [click]

You guys are missing the point...

[voxel (70407)]

Yes, the Xbox would be a wiser choice of hardware, even going with regular cheap PC hardware would be cheaper...

IF you didn't care about having a vector unit.

They used the PS2 to see what performance they could get out of the vector unit. A VCU can do matrix mathematics much faster than most CPU's can because almost all they work they do, they do in *ONE* clock cycle. Similar computations on a CPU could take hundreds. ... 300mhz.. 300 Matricie Operations per second.. Mmmm...

- Jeff

Information on Gov'mnt Grant....

[Danathar (267989)]

Here is a link to an abstract of what the grant is actually for... and a link to the actual award. It's good to see the governement paying attention

https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?a wa rd=0219597

Abstract

Game consoles, with price points below $300, performance rivaling or exceeding that of PCs, and graphics capabilities recently found only on high-end visualization supercomputers, are the vanguard of yet another computing generation . computing on toys. Moreover, market forces and fierce vendor competition (e.g., among Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony) continue to fuel technical innovation and performance improvements on these game platforms, creating research and development incentives and deployment opportunities in new domains. This proposal outlines a research plan to assess the utility and performance of game systems for both scientific computing and high-resolution visualization. This assessment of game systems will be based on development of a suite of adaptive performance analysis tools that support both offline and online performance optimization and their application to a suite of scientific and visualization codes. This effort leverages proposed Red Hat and NCSA software enhancements to PlayStation2 Linux software. In addition we currently are negotiating with Sony to acquire and deploy a large PlayStation2 cluster at NCSA for experimental assessment and scientific visualization. Our computing on toys software research plan focuses on three areas: (a) offline, multilevel performance instrumentation of applications and system software, (b) online, adaptive selection of multi-version code execution, and (c) experimental assessment using large-scale scientific applications and visualization software. New hardware performance measurements, instrumented scientific and graphics libraries, and performance derivatives, all integrated with our SvPablo performance analysis infrastructure, will provide the requisite data to move iterative performance tuning from an ad hoc style to one based on intelligent feedback and suggestions. The offline version of this SvPablo extension will accept performance metrics from hardware, software, and library instrumentation and generates suggestions for tuning locations and options using a fuzzy logic rule base that embodies performance tuning suggestions for the Sony PlayStation2.

Also worth considering: the Xbox

[mkro (644055)]

A Xbox is cheaper than the PS2 (An Xbox is about $150, according to OSDN Pricewatch), comes with twice the amount of memory, ethernet, and instead of buying a $200 Linux kit, you pick up a flashable, legal* mod chip for $25-$50. How the Emotion Engine compares to the Xbox P733 I have no idea, but I can't imagine the EE is that much faster.
Both The Xbox-Linux Project [sourceforge.net] and Gentoox [shallax.com] can provide you with a distro. For free.

Even if you're not planning a cluster, this is a good deal for a low-performance work station, or just a "media box", using Xbox Media Player [xboxmediaplayer.de], which plays most (all?) popular media formats, both music and video.

It's been repeated countles times that Microsoft are losing money on the console itself, and depend on the games to cover their expenses. Therefore, paying up for a Xbox and giving your money to MS isn't immoral as long as you don't buy any games.

See, it's a win-win situation :)

* I lost track of the current situation in the U.S., but in the free world (Read: Europe) at least the chips not using MS code is legal.

Re:Also worth considering: the Xbox

[Malcontent (40834)]

It's illegal to put linux on an Xbox. Why would somebody risk a lawsuit or god forbid a jail sentence to make a cluster?

Re:Also worth considering: the Xbox

[Space cowboy (13680)]

The vector units on the PS2 are far and away more powerful than the graphics card on the XBox. They're fully general-purpose vector processors, not a graphics chip co-pro. I *do* know a little about this topic - I've written a VU simulator...

Go to the Sony PS2 demo section on the PS2 linux site, and look at the VU demos there - or at least read about them. There are examples of marionette models being manipulated in response to the user input (x,y,z,buttons for impulses, etc.) on the controller. The physic

It's the trend of the future

[Ryu2 (89645)]

Since 3-D graphics essentially is comprised manupulating vectors very quickly, the Graphics processors found not only in the PS2, but the latest PC graphics cards are now essentially very fast stream-based vector processors, and can be readily harnessed for general-purpose scientific computation other than graphics: particle, cloth, fluid simulations. The GPU replaces the CPU for computation, and texture or other video memory, with its much higher bandwidth and lower latency than system ram, is used as a backing store for data.

A lot of the GDC and SIGGRAPH 2003 papers focus not on graphics directly, but on scientific computations using the CPU. It's very cool, and if nVidia and ATI the like ever want to expand into a new market, they should build cards with multiple GPUs each, and sell them to the scientific community, or to non-realtime CG places like Pixar to accelerate their offline rendering.

This page has a good summary of the current research going on to make GPUs do stuff other than graphics. http://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~harrism/gpgpu/index.shtml [unc.edu]

Re:It's the trend of the future

[afidel (530433)]

The big problem with using PC graphics cards is that the memory bandwidth on the AGP bus leading back to the system is abysmal. I know several groups looked into this when the Geforce 3 came out and suddenly we had a high speed low cost programmable vector processor, the result was that unless your application could return relativly small datasets you weren't going to get much performance out of them. I think a PS2 would be similarly hampered by the small amount of ram available, not many interesting datasets would fit in it.

This seems like a really good idea

[coupland (160334)]

After all, everyone knows that console hardware is sold for a fairly significant loss, all the profit is in the licensing of titles. One on its own isn't much to sneeze at, but a cluser of 64? You get a fairly powerful cluster and Sony subsidizes your super-computer. Smart idea...

Timex Sinclair Clusters

[leejor (41648)]

Reminds me of a nut case I met at a garage sale some 10 years ago. He was scavenging ZX80 Timex Sinclair in a effort to prove that clustered computing built around very cheap systems was the wave of the future.

I also complained about how he had been an EE for IBM who was not appreciated for his genius. He was very worried that once he released his ZX80 FrankenCluster, IBM would steal it from him due to his old employment contract.

Lee Joramo [joramo.com]

playstation2-linux site with Mozilla

[silvaran (214334)]

Some people might need to use SSL while connecting to the playstation2-linux site, or you'll get a blank page:

https://playstation2-linux.com [playstation2-linux.com]

Re:1 more cluster.....and I'm gonna

[aeinome (672135)]

Cluster fuck. Happy now?

Re:Makes me wanna...

[luzrek (570886)]

I'm pretty sure that the PS2 has a 300 Mhz MIPS processor. Not that it is spectacular, but it isn't that bad either.

Personally I'ld rather have 60 600Mhz Eden Mini-ITX's going.

Re:Makes me wanna...

[t0ny (590331)]

I think they did it so they could say "ooops... um, that PS2 doesnt work quite right. We're not going to use it... maybe if I take it home it will work..."

Re:Yay...

[Mysticalfruit (533341)]

I Highly doubt they paid a dime for any of it... I'm sure they told Sony what they wanted todo and Sony said "Hmm, 65 PS2's and you'll make a cluster out of them and we'll get good press? Sure, where would you like the pallet delivered..."

Still a waste

[nobodyman (90587)]

The hardware costs are negligible whether NCSA paid for the units or not. I doubt Sony paid the salaries of the people working on this -- and this is where the real money is spent. I'm all for people working on projects like this even if it's for no better reason than to see if it can be done. But when my tax dollars are involved, and we are in an economic downturn, and the nation and many states are facing huge budget deficits, my hacker ethic gives way to my pissed-off-taxpayer ethic.

Really, there is no tangible scientific benefit to doing this, so I don't know why they bothered. The only leg they have to stand on is if they argued they were trying to see if a terrorist-friendly nation could build a supercomputer out of toys, but we know this is true already so I still don't like it. If they wan't to play around, they can do it on somebody elses dime... not mine.

Re:Still a waste

[tarzan353 (246515)]

...and you're completely off base. There is a distinct scientific benefit of doing this. The VPU is fast as hell for how cheap the hardware is.

They aren't just "playing around"... this project initially was being directly used by the chemistry department in scientific computing. Only after word got around a little bit did more people start looking into how best to exploit the PS2's power for research.

Re:Iraq

[sould (301844)]

According to Zdnet: [zdnet.co.uk]

A source close to Government Intelligence services in the UK said: "This is complete cobblers. For a start, the suggestion that there's a shortage of standard PC hardware in Iraq is silly. PCs are commodities like cars and washing machines, and they can get as many PIII and P4 PCs as they like, sanctions or no sanctions".

I feel I should make a WMD joke here...but I won't.

Re:Iraq

[by Anonymous Coward]

I feel I should make a WMD joke here...but I won't.

Windows of Mass Destruction

there

Re:Since this came up

[corsec67 (627446)]

If you already have a hard drive hooked up to a PS2, the only thing that you lack is the Linux disc, which is special since it has a Linux boot loader, and a PS2 boot loader togeather. That is a special disc, and is only sold with the kit. If you have a modded PS2, you might be able to use a copy of both discs (first is copyright Sony, and the second is GNU).