Eight PS3 'Supercomputer' Ponders Gravity Waves 293
Jamie found a story about a inexpensive supercomputer being used by an astrophysicist to research gravity waves. The interesting bit is that the system is built using 8 PS3s. Since nobody is actually playing games on the system, it makes sense to use them for research projects like this, but I really wonder now what is defining 'Supercomputer'... I mean, a hundred PS3s sure, but 8? I think we are de-valuing the meaning of the word 'super' :)
Inexpensive, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Inexpensive, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Inexpensive, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it's jsut me, but that sounds like a pretty good deal from Sony
Re:Inexpensive, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's jsut me, but that sounds like a pretty good deal from Sony
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Bullshit. Sony is a hardware manufacturer. They make the whole thing from end to end. They create the price and take all the profit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS3#Sales_and_pricing [wikipedia.org]
Summary of relevant parts of article:
Sony was losing at least $240 per console at launch.
With new manufacturing techniques, etc, they're losing somewhere under $100 dollars.
Either way, they're losing money.
Re:Inexpensive, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Inexpensive, eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Inexpensive, eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, that was my Cost Accounding class talking, I'll stop now.
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Oh, OK. Then I guess they've just been cutting costs for fun. And Microsoft didn't lose billions of dollars on the original XBox.
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Regardless, they are in fact selling the system at a loss [gamasutra.com]...as the price of BlueRay comes down, I imagine they will start to make a profit on the hardware, but that's not currently where their money is coming from. The GP is correct, they make money off of licensing games to run on their system.
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Re:Inexpensive, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:2)
*ducks*
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article and followed the link to his PS3 Gravity Grid [umassd.edu] site, you'd know a couple things about the cost (FREE) for this computational power:
#1) The total cost of purchasing an entire "PS3 Gravity Grid" supercomputer for yourself is less than the cost of a single simulation run on a BlueGene. In other words, you can buy the cow, the pasture, and a barn for the price of a gallon of milk.
#2) Sony *DONATED* his 8-node cluster (albeit with 20GB PS3's which they were closing out at the time) so he actually got a "supercomputer" for nearly free.
#3) The power of the 8-node PS3 cluster is roughly the same as a 200 node partition on a BlueGene SuperComputer (1 PS3 = 25 Blue Gene nodes). With 8 Cell CPUs, he has 56 SPU's running at ~3GHz to crank through his computations. This would mean a single CELL SPU is roughly 4X more powerful than a single BlueGene node which isn't unreasonable considering that it runs at a higher clockspeed (the supercomputer has to worry more about heat dissipation with hundreds or thousands of cores).
#4) I believe that by the US Gov't's somewhat outdated standards, a PS2 qualifies as a supercomputer. The FPU power in a PS3 is on ther order of 200 times higher than that of the PS2 for single precision and considerably more for double precision (which is emulated in software on the PS2).
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)
As a professional programmer working in the games industry (on both XBOX 360 and PS3), I can tell you that's completely untrue. You can verify this easily with information available to the general public [ibm.com] on the CELL microprocessor [wikipedia.org].
The CELL supports Double Precision in hardware. However, the SPU vector instructions only run on Single Precision which allows for up to 8 SP ops (4 X Multiply+Add's) per cycle. Double Precision is scalar (non-vectored) and also not pipelined so the throughput is much slower since DP operations can cause stalls until they complete (there are rumors that IBM is working on a CELL that pipelines DP which will help immensely). Properly pipelined and vectorized Single Precision work can be 30-50 times faster than the scalar non-pipelined DP but the CELL still has true DP hardware which is much faster than emulation by orders of magnitude.
8 systems x 8 cores = (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:8 systems x 8 cores = (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:8 systems x 8 cores = (Score:5, Funny)
It depends. For those problems that fit within the PS3's cramped memory, this is a supercomputer. For those problems that don't, this is a set of 8 matching doorstops.
Re:8 systems x 8 cores = (Score:5, Informative)
9 cores? (Score:5, Funny)
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Ok the PPU is not as powerful as an SPU, it's a basic in-order dual-threaded PowerPC core with the AltiVec instruction set, but you shouldn't ignore it.
Re:8 systems x 8 cores = (Score:4, Insightful)
If you went to a technical conference like, for example, Supercomputing '07, you would get laughed off the floor calling that a supercomputer. Supercomputer is a changing definition, but I don't think I'd call anything a supercomputer that didn't have at least 1TF of peak double-precission performance, and at least 200GB of RAM.
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It was decided that way because we discovered font kerning and non-monospace fonts. You don't need two spaces when the font display properly separates the words for reading. The two spaces was a holdover from monospaced typewriters.
Not surprising... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Strange... (Score:4, Funny)
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Supercomputer is a term that changes (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a freiend who wrote a book 'Nemesis' which was a spy thriller involving a killer asteroid - it was published in the UK 1998, and back then he was talking about 'the teraflop box' as being the fastest computer in the world, unfortunaly it took 8 years to get the book released in the US and by that time a lot of the computer jargon had dated significantly, and you could get a teraflop box in the form of a turbocharged graphics card or cutting edge games console.
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The PS3 is a pretty advanced processing platform, much like today's top-end video cards, especially when working with large sets of data doing floating point math. I'm not surprised at all that it can match the performance of 200 or so pentium-grade cores. (After all, joe blow researcher doesn't get time on one of those top-5 boxes when he signs his check for $5k.... he gets yesterday's tech)
NVIDIA's next graphics card will do a teraflop... (Score:2)
Re:NVIDIA's next graphics card will do a teraflop. (Score:2)
Re:Supercomputer is a term that changes (Score:5, Informative)
The cell is a fantastic piece of equipment - Dr. Dobb's has what I think is an excellent analysis of the kinds of performance benefits that it offers at http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/197801624 [ddj.com]. I'm currently running one at home in a PS3 (for neural networks that drive an AIBO - I love Sony's tendency to dump hugely expensive hardware at mass-market prices), and I have every intention of picking up more used ones over the coming months to cluster together as the networks continue to grow. Even all by it's lonesome with code that's far from optimized, the one I have is running about 10 times faster than my main desktop for roughly equivalent computations.
(Note that your mileage may vary - I just happen to like playing with systems that parallelize really well)
hint to authors (Score:2)
Devalued super (Score:4, Insightful)
Super is a relative term, what was a super computer is now a computer that I hand-me-downed to my mom so she could check her email and browse the web.
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G4 was a supercomputer ... at the time. (Score:4, Informative)
The designation is part of the "Dual-Use" restrictions on exports (basically, things which could be used for both military and non-military applications).
The 1Gflop threshold was set as the necessary processing power to calculate balistic trajectories for missile systems.
I can't find the documentation, but my understanding is that the current threshold is 190Gflop (since Jan 2002).
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Mystery solved (Score:5, Funny)
devaluing super (Score:4, Insightful)
Well the guy used to use a 200-node parallel supercomputer, but now he prefers to use 8 PS3s. That to me proves that 8 PS3s is like a supercomputer TO HIM.
I'm sure there are faster setups available if had the money, but 100% of 8 PS3s indefinitely is preferable, from what he says, to the costly little slices of "real" supercomputers he tried to rent before.
I wonder if Sony could offer a "HPC PSP3" which provided a stripped down processor board without the shiny case, graphics memory etc. It would be interesting if the Cell processor could get better economies of scale.
Re:devaluing super (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:devaluing super (Score:4, Informative)
Wouldn't it rather be IBM that might offer this, since they actually make the cell?
Yes, actually I think you are correct. If I recall correctly it's Sony, IBM and Toshiba in the cell consortium, and the most ovious vendor of a "compute-node Cell module" would indeed be IBM, not Sony, good point.
By the way, I had a typo, it would not be an "HPC PSP3" of course, the Cell is way too hot and power hungry! Although ... of course with sufficient shrinks and price reductions the current Cell might well one day be in a portable game console. Then we could have another round of speculation on personal clusters. I love the "wheel of reincarnation" in digital technology!
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You mean like this?
Thought I replied to this, but can't see it.
Anyway, yes, that's jus the ticket, except it's $19k!!
All of a sudden racking up actual Sony PS3s with their curved shiny cases, graphics chip etc seems eminently sensible
Clearly (Score:2)
Defining "super" (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it simply FlOps? Then at some point, every computer will be a super computer unless you scale the amount of operations with the speed of computers
Is it the 'classical' image of a huge room of boxes chugging away? Then as individual computers get faster and smaller, these rooms will be filled with more computing power as time goes on.
What about parallel processors? The PS3 has some form of parallel processing capability as I understand, so linking eight together isn't just 8 parallel processes it's 8*(parallel processes in one PS3)
Since some 'super' computers of ages past have less power than some modern desktops, I think that the first is more likely if you scale the threshold of a 'super' computer, e.g. the fastest 1-2% of computers out there. More generally, I think that most people conveice of a super computer being any computer system that can perform tasks that would take an unreasonable amount of time on a single, off-the-shelf machine.
"We Report. We Decide." (Score:4, Informative)
You can always count on Slashdot for a fair and balanced presentation of information.
Funny that I've bought 4 disc-based games and at least one downloadable game since the beginning of July, and have been using my PS3 almost exclusively for gaming since then. I'll be buying at least 4 more games before the end of the year, too.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the PS3 game drought has been over for a while now...
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"Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony's PlayStation 3 isn't exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block."
Looks like
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For the linked articles and the comments from the few people who actually have some insight into the issues at hand.
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To give an idea, the top 8 games on PS3 get metacritic scores of 85 or more ( http://www.metacritic.com/games/ps3/scores/ [metacritic.com] ). Only one of those is over 90.
To compare, the 360 has *27* games at 85 or more ( http://www.metacritic.com/games/xbox360/scores/ [metacritic.com] ) 9 of which rate 90 or more.
For me, of those 8 games I'd be interested in 4, 2 of which are also available on PC.
I'
Re:"We Report. We Decide." (Score:5, Insightful)
The four games I was referring to were Ninja Gaiden Sigma (88 [metacritic.com]), Skate (85 [metacritic.com]), Stuntman: Ignition (75 [metacritic.com]), and Warhawk (84 [metacritic.com]). The downloadable game was Super Stardust HD (84 [metacritic.com]). None of those games are even remotely close to "crud".
The four games I referred to having an interest in purchasing before the end of the year are Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Rock Band, and the collector's edition of Stranglehold. I might also consider Army Of Two, Assassin's Creed, and Call Of Duty 4, depending on the reviews.
> To give an idea, the top 8 games on PS3 get metacritic scores of 85 or more [...] Only one of those is over 90. To compare, the 360 has *27* games at 85 or more [...] 9 of which rate 90 or more.
The original post had nothing to do with the 360 -- it was about the insinuation that no one uses the PS3 for gaming, which is ridiculous.
You're also making an apples to oranges comparison, because the 360 has been out longer and has a much larger base of titles. But if you want to compare, as of October 13th Metacritic's aggregated ratings for the 360 [metacritic.com], PS3 [metacritic.com], and Wii [metacritic.com] show that the 360 has 264 rated games, the PS3 has 82, and the Wii has 87. Since the PS3 and Wii came out later than the 360 and around the same time as each other, this makes sense.
If you look at the percentage of each console's library that has a metascore of 75 (out of 100) or higher, the PS3 leads with 54%, followed by the 360 at 44%, then the Wii with only 16%. If you go with a metascore of 80+, the PS3 has 34%, the 360 has 27%, and the Wii has only 8% above that level. At 90+ the Wii has 3%, the 360 has 3%, and the PS3 trails with only 1% of its library at that level.
Going by percentages, the PS3 and 360 libraries are of roughly equivalent quality, while the Wii's lags far behind.
> the general sentiment is the PS3 needs a killer app (like a halo, gears of war, or some other really good exclusive title) to make it worth getting.
The general sentiment is also that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and that Britney Spears's personal life is somehow newsworthy. I'll think for myself, thanks.
That said, every console gets a "killer app" eventually. I'm sure the inevitable God Of War III will fill that void if nothing else does beforehand.
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I hear Fox News is the place for that.
Only one of those statements is intended as sarcasm, but I'll let the reader decide which
Memory limitations (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Memory limitations (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me see if I get this straight, you can imagine a piece of code that doesn't mind churning on itself within 256KB, but you can't imagine having to keep 256MB of main memory fed from a network or disk? In my experience, any piece of code that can both benefit from extreme parallelism and fit both the code and enough data to be worth working on within 256KB can handle a few reads from a disk or the network once in a while. If it can't, then 256KB of memory isn't enough to keep the (sub)processor fed, and you need a machine with more on-die memory (many of which can be found).
Cell is very good at integers and single precision floats for workloads that are parallelizable and fit within 256KB. If you stray from any of that, there are plenty of interesting competitors.
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Keep in mind that the SPE's local storage is basically a software managed cache. So your argument of "churning on itself within 256kb" would also apply to an L1 or L2 cache.
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I wouldn't agree with that. That's only true if the algorithm relies on access to the entire data set because it requires random access or multiple table scans. Lots of algorithms can operate on small independant chunks or can be rewritten to use sequential data access, which is chunk friendly. I think it's apparent his algorithm works on small chunks due to the relatively small amount of RAM, unless his entire data set
This one goes to 11... (Score:2)
Why not? (Score:2)
Apple's G4 Campaign (Score:2, Redundant)
Only 256 Megs of RAM (Score:2, Informative)
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Personal Supercompter? (Score:2)
Any plans for that?
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I hate troll article summaries. (Score:2, Insightful)
Since nobody is actually playing games on the system, it makes sense to use them for research projects like this
Yes, because ~4 million people count as "nobody". But seriously, am I the only one that's tired of troll article summaries around here? It's either a flippant comm
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Wow. I can't imagine the level of frustration you must feel.
Definition of a Super Computer? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.answers.com/topic/supercomputer?cat=biz-fin [answers.com]
they define a 'supercomputer' as being "A mainframe computer that is among the largest, fastest, or most powerful of those available at a given time". This is suitably vague, since the point of reference changes all the time. On the other hand there is no point of reference in the definition. For example, does it have to be in the top 100 or 100x more powerful than the current top of the line PC? Without a suitable reference point anyone could call their cluster amongst, the "largest, fastest or most powerful".
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Other than that, the defn' seems pretty good. I don't get this need to quantify so precisely. "Among" seems a perfectly good term.
For example, let's say you have a bona fide super computer, - one of the top 100. A guy down the street has #193 but it doesn't make much sense to say that his isn't a supercomputer u
supercomputer: highest magnitude of speed (Score:2)
1.2 TFlops (Score:5, Informative)
Using Jack Dongerra's single-precision algorithms that do half the work in single and the other half in double precision, you can maintain a high level of performance and precision. And, the unique architecture of the Cell opens up some interesting algorithmic research issues, allowing scientists to publish twice for the same work: once for the science results, once for the computer science results.
On the flip side, the Gigabit ethernet on the PS3s isn't really 1GB - the PPU can barely keep up. So, extra care must be taken around communication points. And, a similar Intel/AMD-based rack would run about $20k and is much easier to develop for, so if your labor is expensive (i.e., you're not in academia), PS3 clusters may not make much sense.
-Chris
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Supercomputer ... (Score:2)
Well, I don't know what qualifies as a supercomputer nowadays ...
But, to some of us, any computer made in the last decade at one point would have qualified as a supercomputer. I seem to recall any machine which had > 1GHz of CPU speed used to be classified as munitions grade equipment and illegal for export. Something to do with being able to design
US gov export restrictions (Score:2)
I wonder if the US governments' restrictions on exporting super computers covers game consoles as well. If it does the Xbox 360 is most certainly restricted.
(not that it is really a super computer, but if you have ever had to deal with said restrictions you know that 10 year old desktops are considered supercomputers by the US gov)
Slashdot bribed by Microsoft... (Score:3, Interesting)
I do work web site administration for a non-profit organization and it's amazing how much we'll bend backwards to accommodate the views of our sponsors. If a sponsor gives us money, we'll be sure to remove a reference to another organization, just to appease them.
Since Microsoft buys lots of ad space across many Internet sites, including this one, it's no surprise that many of these sites will put an anti-Sony spin on their "news".
These sites will call the 40GB PS3 "gimped", while calling the 360 Arcade "a deal", as well as other hypocritical bs.
When your income depends on advertising money, you'll do whatever it takes to appease your sponsors.
Back to Basics... (Score:3, Funny)
Nope. It is far too unaerodynamic to reach such speeds without a prohibitive amount of initial energy. Certainly not unassisted.
Is it more powerful than a locomotive?
While it concumes about the same amount of raw fuel, it produces far too little in the way of mechanical enregy to pull even a single model RR caboose. Amtrak found this out to their chagrin.
Is it able to leap tall buildings with a single bound?
While it does acheive a much heralded TeraFLOP, it turns out that that word does not actually mean "hitting the Earth" as a casual guess at its derivation might assume. So, in a nutshell, no jumping, buildings or otherwise, without significant assistance.
Finally, does it fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way?
The ultimate in guileless parroting, it will simply display whatever it is told, and will never consider the veracity of the content before micrying it. Justice is a bit trickier in that there is little about Justice that is agreed upon. Once GTA IV comes out however, there will no longer be any support for the notion of it supporting even justice with a little "j." As for the American Way... Well it does favor style over substance with an arrogant belief taht it will be Bought because it is Made. Which is about as close to the American Way these days as anything else. call it one out of three.
So, no, I would have to say that it would not qualify, in any quantity, as a "Super-Computer."
Yeah... (Score:2)
It probably *is*super in a retro sense... (Score:2)
Rather than a sense of the word 'supercomputer' being devalued, maybe its definition just needs to keep up with the times.
Good call (Score:3, Insightful)
There are servers that use the CELL chip, from IBM, see the Blade server. [wikipedia.org] But the Blade server is quite a bit expensive; that is 8 PS3's at the UK price was cheaper the last time I looked. On top of all that is the 'pooling' that the CELL chip does, while this won't be that good for simulation (with current, popular implementations, e.g. MPI2), it will be awesome for games: succinctly, any process that requires extra 'power' can request another node from the 'pool' and release it back when it is under less strain. The transport latency (often the biggest latency in Parallel, even with fibre optic switches, unless its a purely Monte Carlo sim...) is much reduced by having all processors on a single die. The architecture is a mix with vector based operations as well.
Prima facie it would be perfect to use multiple PS3s. After speaking to some HPC chaps, at Edinburgh Uni,they informed me that the memory on the PS3's is pretty low (512MB split between video and the conventional) which can be a pain if you want to perform REALLY big simulations (which, when scaling is accounted for, is pretty much the point of using supercomputers... not _necessarily_ speed, lets not make this the point of debate, it is simulation dependent.). I will also add that the memory, though small, is bloody fast. If you can code to keep bloat completely removed, you won't need many BG processes; and split memory requirements between each of the PS3s then it is a really, really nice system. Takes a bit of effort and a learning curve, but there are many resources online, native Linux support is an Uber Bonus for Sony (though I am considering NOT buying a PS3, or many, due to their Media departments behavior!).
Devalues the meaning of "super"? (Score:2)
Research grant? (Score:4, Funny)
Ob. Simpsons quote (Score:2)
Moe: This thing can flash fry a buffalo in 30 seconds.
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To be honest, the OP is flamebait: "Since nobody is actually playing games on the system."
Making a generalized statement like that is asking for trouble. Meanwhile, I happen to be enjoying my PS3 as I don't plan on buying any Microsoft product for many years to come. I can tell you however that I do have 10 games (13 if you count the PSN downloads, and probably
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Derivative of title count with respect to time (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, so now you need ten games? Last month everyone was crying "Name three exclusives!"
What we have here is what your calculus teacher would call a derivative. From a video gaming platform's launch until its end of life, there is supposed to be a rate of release of exclusive games. If they were saying three last quarter and ten this quarter, that means that in the xth quarter after a console is first sold in a region, there need be about seven worthy games. The analysis also needs to take into account that exclusives can become no longer exclusive. Other than games developed by a studio cont