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Editorial Math Entertainment Games

Distributed Computing on Next Gen Consoles 251

Posted by Zonk from the working-for-the-man dept.
anonymous lion writes "Wired has a story on the need for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to support distributed computing with a non-gaming purpose. The article goes on to discuss SETI@home, distributed.net, and Folding@Home." From the article: "The next generation of console gaming is going to see a huge increase in machine performance and overall computing power. Already planned for both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are multiple 3.2-GHz PowerPC processors capable of handling advanced gaming and graphics simulations, along with out-of-the-box internet capabilities such as Xbox Live Silver. With all that horsepower in a machine that is used for only a fraction of a day, we should offer gamers a chance to put these unused resources to good use."
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Distributed Computing on Next Gen Consoles More

Distributed Computing on Next Gen Consoles

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  • "Unused resources"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:00AM (#12855635)
    How about switching the thing off?
    Its not that a game console is something like a desktop pc, running the whole day just to be quickly accessable....

    • Re:"Unused resources"? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Curtman ( 556920 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:04AM (#12855648)
      Its not that a game console is something like a desktop pc

      They aren't? [hardwarezone.com]
      • That not the point, i know the internals of every console out there as good as anybody.

        I wasnt talking about the hardware, but about the usage pattern (no long boot times, usually longer play sessions, no multitasking) that makes a difference between game console and desktop pc.

        • Re:"Unused resources"? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Curtman ( 556920 )
          (no long boot times, usually longer play sessions, no multitasking) that makes a difference between game console and desktop pc.

          I've never been a big fan of game consoles for that reason. I modchipped a few X-Box's for friends and played with XBMC a bit, but it was very much a toy in my eyes too. It also seemed like Microsoft was fighting our attempts to turn it into a PC at every turn. This next generation is going to be different from the looks of things though. I found this quote particularly int

        • Unused entirely (Score:2, Insightful)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          Do the "longer play sessions" of a game console continue through the night? This isn't the era of the NES, where 5-hour games didn't have a save feature *cough*Super Mario 3*cough* and players would leave the console on pause overnight. Besides, a TV can be used for only one thing at a time, and if it's not playing games through a console or playing DVDs through a console or other DVD player, it's either off, showing cable TV, or showing satellite TV.

    • So, there are actually two resources that are available - the first is the computing power, the second would be the heat energy.

      I've always thought it was an incredible shame that there are all these electric base board heaters out there that just do that - heat. It seems to my (possibly demented) mind, that it would make more sense to have those heaters consist of processors doing some type of useful calculation.

      So, in houses heated by electricity, maybe it would make sense to leave the PS3/XBox-360s on
      • On average.

        "They are, after all, an almost 100% efficient heater."

        Electricity has to be generated. Most generation plant is around 35% -> 40%, CCGT around 60%.

        Electricity is an extremely inefficient way of providing heat. In houses heated or cooled with electricity the most efficient thing you could do is rip out the heating and air conditioning and replace it with district heating and district cooling.

    • Well, it may not be much of an issue now, but this is quickly changing.

      Both Microsoft and Sony are playing with the idea that these game consoles will do more than merely play games. If it also has DVR functionality, advanced DVD capabilities, etc., then the day will soon arrive where people DO leave them on 24x7.

      I have a TiVo, which is just a special-purpose computer. I wouldn't mind at all if it had a "power down" mode that would run a grid application such as trying to help cure cancer while it's n

      • Can't find any figures on PS2/XBox power consumption, but you're probably looking at around 100W each (my DVD player takes around 140, for example), so that's around 150 kilowatt hours/month, which (at the rates I, in the UK, pay for electricity) is around $29/month. Unless you're leaving it on for game state, WHY???

        (If someone in the US could work out how much 150 kilowatt hours actually costs, would be appreciated)

        However... doesn't the noise drive you nuts? I've woken up in the middle of the night, and
        • In Albany, NY, my numbers for May are;

          3.9219 cents per kWh delivery charge x 150 = 588.285 cents = $5.88
          plus
          6.8590 cents per kWh supply charge x150 = 1028.85 cents = $10.29

          For a total of $16.17 per month.

          This is usage alone and does not include taxes, stupid little surcharges, etc. Which probably bring the total closer to $25.
    • Wait... if Microsoft and Nintendo are both getting these 3.2+GHz PowerPC processors for their new systems, then why is Apple complaining that PowerPC processors have not broke 3.0GHz?? (their reasoning for switching to Intel)

      Are these not the same PPC used with Apple? (PowerPC 970 FX for the game systems, not sure about the G5)

      MHz for MHz, a 3.2GHz PPC should kick the crap out of a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, and shouldn't be far behind--if behind at all--the performance of a P4 or AMD 3.8GHz (or whatever they're u

      • Re:3.2 GHz PowerPC ? (Score:2, Informative)

        by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
        MS doesn't have PowerPC CPUs, those cores are in-order PPC-based chips for embedded systems (same goes for the Cell's all-purpose core). They'd perform awfully in PCs. Chris Hecker claimed the chip is 3-10 times slower than a comparably clocked PPC in the Burning Down The House session at GDC. A P4 at a similar clock speed would kick the shit along with the intestines out of that "PPE".

        It's actually not known what kind of chip Nintendo will use, not the clock speed, not the features, nothing except the cod
    • > How about switching the thing off?
      >
      Well, other than the fact I like running SETI and stuff from home, I plan on using the XBox360 (and PS3?) as an internet chat client. I hope the VoIP software will help me to keep in touch with my gaming friends. :) If it could run SETI while chatting with friends, I'm sold.

  • Most people won't do it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aussie_a ( 778472 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:00AM (#12855637) Journal
    And most people won't offer to have their console used for Seti or folding or whatever. Something that's needed more then horsepower, is the willingness to bother with it. And that will stop too many of these things from being overly popular.
    • Why would people do this? So their Clan would get a higher score! If winning is not important, Commander, why keep score? [klingon.org] Don't underestimate the average gamer's fascination with scores and rankings. In fact, I think this is crucial to the process.

      Seriously, if this is like Folding@Home [stanford.edu] that gets out of the way when the CPU is being used, it would still get some crunching done in the game chat rooms and the in-between-the-levels limbo modes. If there's enough computing power left over for live TeamSpe
    • And what about the XBOX,Playstation 2, Gamecube Linux communities? There are probably thousands of people who have modded their game consoles to run linux. If they take the time and energy to mod their game consoles for Linux, who says there won't be people to mod them for Distributed Computing?
  • It's great to help cure cancer, but not if it causes the number of polygons on Lara Croft's breasts to drop.

    Also, will users have a choice concerning whether to so use their consoles' spare cycles, or will it happen without their concent or even overt knowledge? Will they be able to decide which project gets the use of their machine's time? And what if someone comes up with an entertainment use for those cycles...?

    • Re:Unspoken subtext: 'cause they're overpowered (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gherald ( 682277 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:09AM (#12855665) Journal
      > It's great to help cure cancer, but not if it causes the number of polygons on Lara Croft's breasts to drop.

      It's the ass, you n00b!

      But this is irrelevant. The most sensible choice and the one Wired is advocating is a distributed client that runs when the system is not being used for gaming.

      > will users have a choice concerning whether to so use their consoles' spare cycles, or will it happen without their concent or even overt knowledge?

      Obviously the more control the user has, the better. But anything would be better than nothing.

      > Will they be able to decide which project gets the use of their machine's time?

      See above.

      > And what if someone comes up with an entertainment use for those cycles...?

      No doubt it will result in a story being submitted to Slashdot.
    • It's great to help cure cancer, but not if it causes the number of polygons on Lara Croft's breasts to drop.
      Polygons? Ick! Wake me when they've got realtime rendering of CURVES.
    • "If you decide not to volunteer to the project, there's a higher risk of Lara losing one breast to cancer"

      Run program? [Yes][No]

      That should do it.

  • waste power (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:03AM (#12855644)
    Sure,
    the average consumer LOVES to waste power and bandwidth to search for aliens. Folding, Seti & others are good projects, but if Wired thinks the average console owner wants his console to suck power, bandwidth, and make huge fan noise while not doing something with it,they may be seriously mistaken.

    I'm sure the same people that run Linux on their XBOX will run folding on their console, but not the majority of users, even if the console ships with that functionality.
    • agreed. It might help cure cancer, but at the same time the gigawatts of power that is being wasted is doing god knows what to the environment (until we have clean renewable energy anyway).

  • I don't play well with the other kids (Score:3, Funny)

    by nso ( 825449 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:04AM (#12855647)
    I'm fed up with the idea that sharing is caring. I don't like to share. I don't want anyone using my bandwidth, my CPU-cycles, my harddrive or my bathroom. It's not that I don't have a high bandwidth connection or several idle CPU's laying around, it's just that I don't like the idea of giving when all I want is recieving (i.e. torrent) I say we put an end to this hippiecomu P2P and other distributed services once and for all.

  • Theres a need? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:07AM (#12855656)
    I think someone has confused something they would like with an actual requirement. I can just see all the parents lining up to subscribe to this 'need' because they really want to use their jumped up electricity bills to help search for extratrestrial life signs

  • It's the money, stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrshowtime ( 562809 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:20AM (#12855685)
    All of the new console makers are going to be losing mega cash for each console sold, so why would they make any incentive for anyone to buy their consoles and use them as computers? The manufacturers lose money on the console and lose any possible revenue from game sales.

    If the console manufacturers provide software that somehow taps the raw horsepower of the new consoles what would stop organizations, legal or not, from buying large quantities of game systems just to make a supercomputer for very cheap? Fuck that.

    If I had not preordered my PS2 a year in advance I would have had to wait NINE months to be able to get one in the states. The demand for the new systems is going to be even greater. The last thing consumers need to hear is that there is a shortage of their favorite game system because Nerd University bought 10,000 systems for their new supercomputer project.

    Shared computing is all fine and good for PC/Mac users, but honestly, for a manufacturer to open the floodgates of their OS to satisfy the wants of .01% of the uber-nerd population is insanity.
    • Um ... right ... because only nerds are interested in curing diseases?
    • All of the new console makers are going to be losing mega cash for each console sold, so why would they make any incentive for anyone to buy their consoles and use them as computers? The manufacturers lose money on the console and lose any possible revenue from game sales.

      That's a hypothesis, not a fact. Right now, it looks like the Xbox 360 and PS/3 will be rather expensive, probably expensive enough to cover the hardware.

      Furthermore, both machines will be far more general-purpose computers than curren

  • Not feasible (Score:5, Informative)

    by eheien ( 94444 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:22AM (#12855692)
    At least with current platforms architectures. The author seems to do plenty of research on current distributed computing projects, but does none on how the consoles perform.

    I know that SETI@home has been ported and tested at least on the XBox, and it performs miserably. These console gaming systems are designed to play games, not do radio signal analysis or other scientific calculation. For example, there's little need for fast memory writing when you're mostly reading textures from RAM, but there's an extreme need when you do millions of in-place Fourier transforms. Unless Microsoft and Sony change their architectures for some inexplicable reason, I can't imagine future architectures would perform much better.

    This article smacks of ignorance on the part of the author, who clearly did no research into the actual performance of consoles in regard to standard scientific computing.
    • Well, of course the XBox is just a poor-performance PC clone at its heart. But the PS3 could quite possibly run circles around standard desktops. And even if it's not extraordinarily fast ... the offset is that there will be MILLIONS of them.
    • > At least with current platforms architectures.
      >The author seems to do plenty of research on
      >current distributed computing projects, but does
      >none on how the consoles perform.

      Apparently from what you posted you don't know jack shit about those new consoles architectures...

      >For example, there's little need for fast memory
      > writing when you're mostly reading textures from
      >RAM, but there's an extreme need when you do
      >millions of in-place Fourier transforms.

      PS3 has XDR-DRAM which is
      • > For FFT, the Cell processor in PS3 performs 100 times faster than Pentium 4 in some tests, if properly configured.

        This is exactly my point. Individually the processor may perform well, but when it's placed in the actual system, perform will undoubtedly drop. Right now, I'm doing performance tests on FFTs performed on GPUs (graphics cards). Theoretically, these should perform at the same "incredible" speed as the Cell processor (10 Gflops or better), but in reality bandwidth and cache constricts pe

      • Note that the chart says that the "100x" test was for single precision calculations. For most scientific applications, it's double precision or nothing. I hear the Cell's double precision capabilities aren't shabby, though.

    • The Cell processor (PS3) is made for those applications. At the Power.org convention in Barcelona [power.org], IBM presented a programming example of large FFTs on Cell. It turned out [beyond3d.com], that large FFT calculations are about 100 times faster than on a Xeon 3.2 GHz processor.
      Keep in mind, that this presentation was held in front of super computer professionals and its not that easy to trick them.
  • Since distributed computing projects crank your CPU to 100%, there's definitely an associated energy and environmental cost to running that stuff. This will become increasingly true in the future, with the increasing prevelence of technologies like Intel's "SpeedStep" or AMD's "Cool And Quiet" that allow CPU clockspeeds to dynamically vary the clockspeed and power consumption of a processor. That will only increase the difference in power consumption between a CPU at rest and a CPU that's pegged at 100% crunching SETI units.

    Distributed computing advocates always seem to neglect this. They think that all those unused CPU cycles are a vast, untapped resource just waiting to accomplish fabulous things. Well, as a guy who used to have a few boxes crunching RC5-64 for Distributed.net, I can tell you that it's not a free resource when you're the one paying the electric bill.

    Joe Consumer isn't necessarily going to think this technology is a great idea when he realizes that he's paying an extra $10 a month on his electricity bill for the "privilege" of crunching numbers for some dubious cause.

    And, let's face it. Not all distributed projects are dubious, but many are. The fundamental problem is that a lot of compute-intensive projects simply aren't embarassingly parallel like SETI or RC5-64. And a lot of other parallelizable applications require access to huge datasets that make them unsuitable for distributed work. For example, 3D rendering can be parallelized pretty well... but the datasets are huge. For your CPU to render a single frame of Pixar's latest movie, it would need access to anywhere from hundreds of MB to several GB of texture and geometry data. A lot of scientific applications are similarly constrained.

  • To help who? (Score:2, Troll)

    by tres3 ( 594716 )
    I can see helping SETI, testing an encryption algorithm, or some other such entity but I damn sure am not going to help find a cure for cancer so that the pharmacutical companies can make even more money and deny yet another life saving resource from the people that can least afford it. If the mega-corporations want the world to donate their spare computing resources to them then they should start doing some things for the people. It is amazing that we allow it but we do. Taxpayers spend hundreds of mill

    • Re:To help who? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dr. Weird ( 566938 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @08:02AM (#12855795)
      Two points:

      (1) All of the distributed applications that you mention release the results of their research as public scientific publications. Any companies can use the results, but so can anyone else. Subscription to the journals is all that costs money, but generally free "e-prints" are available. All of the distributed applications that you mention are non-profit.

      (2) Even if they were patenting the results (which they aren't -- see 1) it is better to have the patented result that one has to pay for than to have nothing. If I have breast cancer, I would rather pay $1000 for a test than be unable to get a test because no company wanted to invest in it.

      As a side rant (somewhat related to (2)), you say patents are inhibiting progress. But without the financial incentive that the breast cancer patent generated, the medicine would never have been developed. I'm sorry that so many people only work out of greed, but that's reality at the moment. And it actually works pretty well.

      • Re:To help who? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by tres3 ( 594716 )
        Point 1:
        Ok, I stand corrected here. I have seen distributed computing come up where things were not going to be released back to the public though. Most universities, including the afore mentioned Stanford, are doing research with corporations who get to monopolize the results when something useful comes out of them (and taxpayers subsidize university research departments). Although this article doesn't indicate that one way or the other. It does give a link to the project but I don't really want my or
    • It sounds like you're saying drug companies should be run like Walmart (focusing on low prices instead of innovation), like European drug companies [forbes.com]. If it sounds so easy, you might try your hand at financing the approval of a new drug. You may find it a more expensive and risky proposition [legalaffairs.org] than you imagine.
      • Walmart doesn't use taxpayer money to develop products (nor are they asking the world to donate their spare computer cycles). Drug companies do. I'm also not happy that European drug companies leave the R&D to their American counterparts and more importantly leave the funding of R&D to the American taxpayers & drug companies (who pass on that costs to American consumers since the Europeans don't pay the same high prices that Americans do). Your point is well taken though and "no" I don't want

  • Want to get paranoid? You do? Cool!

    Figure: There are plenty of distributed computing projects out there, and it may not be easy to tell from your console's behavior what project you're actually contributing to. Now consider who makes those consoles:

    • Microsoft, whose vested interest is increasing its market share and busting anyone sharing illegal content (software), and
    • Sony, whose vested interest is increasing its market share and busting anyone sharing illegal content (music and video).

    Now imagine y

  • Altruism is not the best motivator (Score:3, Interesting)

    by putko ( 753330 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @07:50AM (#12855768) Homepage Journal
    If Martz wants to use the video game consoles and electricity of people to do his calculations, let him give the people something they want in return, like free games.

    That would probably be enough to motivate a lot more people to turn their machines over to SETI.

    The idea that people are going to let their machine run their crunching away, for free, for no benefit, is pretty stupid. The first distributed computing project to offer any sort of tschocke is likely to become more help.
    • The idea that people are going to let their machine run their crunching away, for free, for no benefit, is pretty stupid.

      This isn't necessarily true. If you look at the hundreds of thousands of people running Folding@Home, GIMPS (mersenne prime search), SETI@home, etc. ,they are all dedicating their CPU usuage to the greater cause of their particular project. 99.9% of them will never get a direct personal return for their contirubtion, except for the rare few who, like for GIMPS, find a new Mersenne prime

      • This isn't necessarily true. If you look at the hundreds of thousands of people running Folding@Home, GIMPS (mersenne prime search), SETI@home, etc. ,they are all dedicating their CPU usuage to the greater cause of their particular project.

        Sure. But look at the hundreds of *millions* of people who *aren't* running SETI@Home, etc..

        You literally have several orders of magnitude more people not running these apps than people who are.

        Given that /. and other tech sites, along with various science and tec

  • With people having access to several cores for handling computation, there are still some who would think we need a Physics Card [ageia.com]. Wouldn't you hate it to know that you have 4 cores on a system, and yet your system is only using one because someone thought we needed proprietary cards for everything.
    • Firstly: Of course, you're right, we've got so much processing power now, we can just throw out the proprietary cards. None of this foolish graphics card nonsense, we'll just... ...no, wait, that doesn't make sense!

      Secondly: Ageia are targetting the PC platform. They've joined up with ASUS to make a plug-in card for PCs. As far as I know, there are no plans for their chips to turn up in next-gen consoles. This particularly means they'll have to show that their card actually improves things. If it doesn't,

  • The future of business computing? (Score:3, Informative)

    by panurge ( 573432 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @08:06AM (#12855806)
    If, as someone points out elsewhere, these consoles are optimised to handle rendering of backgrounds rather than general purpose computing, wouldn't it be more interesting to see if, with a suitable architecture, they couldn't be used in thin(ish) client applications? Perhaps an Xbox is just the thing to render Looking Glass (the proposed Sun 3d desktop) when (if) it is eventually commercialised.

    Perhaps IBM doesn't just want to sell chips to these people. Perhaps it has a reason for selling the PC division to Lenovo. Perhaps it sees an opportunity to create a business architecture in which the virtual business world runs on the server farm, while the graphics and sound capability of the very cheap clients delivers a superior user experience that makes users happy not to have a "PC" on their desk. Meanwhile the data mining and compute-intensive activities are farmed out to those clients while they aren't being used. Fault tolerant. Cheap to extend. And round objects to Microsoft.

  • another solution (Score:2, Insightful)

    by eugene259 ( 871089 )
    the article talks about distributed computing on large scale which is not very feasible for all the above mentioned reasons like
    a) companies wouldn't spend money on building this into the console
    b) most consumers cannot be bothered
    There will be people who'd be interested though. I'd try it if I had a ps3... However with more and more use of clustered smaller machines in place of large supercomputers, clusters of consoles have been built in unis and research labs (for example here [uiuc.edu] or here [uh.edu]. There are a few ad
  • Though Xbox 360 requires modding or an official treatment by Microsoft in its firmware to add a client for distributed computing which is very unlikely, PS3 will be able to run it from day one on its Linux [slashdot.org], and even an SPE-optimized version of a client may be available later.
  • I doubt many people are going to offer their home console systems for this purpose.

    But given the relatively low cost and simple setup of these machines, labs could buy racks of them and use them as compute nodes. Perhaps Sony and Microsoft can view any small per-unit loss they may take on these machines as subsidizing research.

  • Not an easy article for me to read. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Burz ( 138833 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @08:51AM (#12855949) Homepage Journal
    1. I bought my first Mac in February. Now it seems PPCs are not in the Mac future.

    2. I run ClimatePrediction.net on my Mac and Linux x86 systems. The program is huge, comes from a mainframe environment, and is married to an INTEL compiler. The PPC version is, needless to say, not very fast. Single work units can take months to complete.

    The other projects in the article would be on my plate, too, if they compared with my concern for climate change.

  • mobile phones... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jack79 ( 792876 )
    Something I've thought about a few times, but done no research on whatsoever, is the possibility of distributed computing on mobile phones. They are getting more and more powerful, more and more ubiquitous, and they are connected to a network. And they're kept on all day with their processors idle for the most part. We could use this computing horsepower for somthing that will benefit all of society, such as processing marketing data.
    • I think the problem there is that cell phones are designed in such a way as to minimize the amount of energy used. If there was one place for a processor that didn't use power when it wasn't actually performing calculations, cell phones would be it.

      So to make it happen, consumers would probably have to suffer with shorter battery life or larger batteries. Given how neat everyone thinks it is to have a cell phone which they can lose inside their own ears, I just don't see it happening.

      Maybe something
    • And they're kept on all day with their processors idle for the most part.

      But an idle processor generally uses less power than a busy processor, and on battery powered devices such as mobile phones power usages is a _huge_ issue.

  • Folding Flaws (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mulletproof ( 513805 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @10:14AM (#12856238) Homepage Journal
    "With all that horsepower in a machine that is used for only a fraction of a day, we should offer gamers a chance to put these unused resources to good use."

    Now the Captain is wondering how many of us actually leave our consoles on when not in use? Show of hands... Now! Hmmm, not too many. Now how many of you would actually like to pay extra in electric bills to do it? Ouch. Even less. And finally, how many are going to mod their PS3 and actually downloard the app to make it happen? That leaves just about... Nobody.

    • You're not from the US? I'm from Germany, but for me it was quite shocking when I was working in our US branch office and realized, that noone turned off the desktop computer at the end of the day. It was even harder to understand that nobody turned off the monitor (CRTs and LCDs) when they went home. Just a few computers were configured to put the monitor into power save mode. I visited some of my colleagues and friends and when we arrived, their computer and monitor were turned on - the whole day. So I

      • Re:Folding Flaws (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Mulletproof ( 513805 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @02:01PM (#12857276) Homepage Journal
        You bring up a good point and you're right. Quite a few people never turn off their PCs, probably because they don't want to have to wait for it to boot again. In fact, that trend alone has allowed something like folding@home to succeed-- If you're not going to turn it off, might as well put it to use.

        But consoles are different, probably because just leaving them on doesn't really accomplish anything useful for 90% of the people. They boot nearly instantaneously and will have to load the media from scratch anyway, regardless of whether you leave it on or off. It's like there's no point to do so. Unless I missed a clue somewhere, i can't EVER remember walking into ANYBODIES room to find the console just left on, unless it was purely by accident. It's just not the trend and stuff like Seti and folding can't easily piggyback off something that isn't already an ingrained habit. Not a lot of people are going to change just so they can use their system.
  • In MacOS, there are a few apps that already have the capability to take advantage of distributed computing. 'distcc' lets me offload compiling to several machines. The high end video / dvd apps also support distributed processing for video compression (e.g. converting MiniDV video to MPEG2 for a DVD project).

    I would love to be able to let my PowerBook or Mac Mini send compute jobs to a PS3 or XBOX360. I suppose the PS3's cell architecture could really crank out the MPEG2 video.

    Hopefully the distribut

  • Give bonus levels, stronger guns as rewards (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kanweg ( 771128 ) on Sunday June 19, 2005 @12:53PM (#12856962)
    Apart from the fact that during gaming itself the Distributed Computing program should be (and probably will, as they do now) in the background doing nothing, and that they shouldn't run 100% but rather a bit lower when the console is idle, I could definitely see this happen if the game manufacturers give bonus levels, more bullets, stronger armour or whatever is good, nice and fun in a game. For the game manufacturers it will generate a ton of free publicity when their game helps curing cancer. The gamers get more fun. And if you don't want that, you turn it off. Now how hard is this?

    Bert
    Bonus sllogan: Save a live and you get an additional live.
  • Well now, something I can really comment on ;)

    First of all, don't hold your breath. Running distributed computing apps on a console == running arbitrary code. We update these programs all the time behind the scenes. So you will only see these apps on consoles if you see these companies let you run any code you want - not going to happen. Never.

    And, if that happens, consoles will all be busy as spam zombies, not as helpers to us. Bad news - that's where all the serious black hat money is these days.

    That s
  • Distributed.net would be tough to talk a consumer into. Hey here is this really cool distributed computing project where we try and break encryption. Isn't that fun?!

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