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This is originally from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/26/te...b4c831356e7be5 . And yes, it's written by Jerkoff, but actually of some interest. I've been real big on SMP and clustering/over-the-wire processing technologies for years, and the idea of a $50,000 supercomputer is very, very appealing.
May 26, 2003
By JOHN MARKOFF
As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the computing power
of sophisticated but inexpensive video-game consoles, the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a
supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2's.
The resulting system, with components purchased at retail
prices, cost a little more than $50,000. The center's
researchers believe the system may be capable of a half
trillion operations a second, well within the definition of
supercomputer, although it may not rank among the world's
500 fastest supercomputers.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses
the open source Linux operating system, is that the only
hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the
individual game machines in a rack and plugging them
together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch.
The center's scientists bought 100 machines, but are
holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display
application.
"It took a lot of time because you have to cut all of these
things out of the plastic packaging," said Craig Steffen, a
senior research scientist at the center, who is one of four
scientists working part time on the project.
The scientists are taking advantage of a standard component
of the Sony video-game console that was originally intended
to move and transform pixels rapidly on a television screen
to produce lifelike graphics. The chip is not the
PlayStation 2's MIPS microprocessor, but rather a graphics
co-processor known as the Emotion Engine. That custom
designed silicon chip is capable of producing up to 6.5
billion mathematical operations a second.
The impressive performance of the game machine, which has
been on the market for a few years, underscores a radical
shift that has taken place in the computing world since the
end of the cold war in the late 1980's, according to the
researchers.
While the most advanced computing technologies have
historically been developed first for large corporate users
and military contractors, increasingly the fastest
computers are being developed for the consumer market and
for products meant to be placed under Christmas trees.
"If you look at the economics of game platforms and the
power of computing on toys, this is a long-term market
trend and computing trend," said Dan Reed, the
supercomputing center's director. "The economics are just
amazing. This is going to drive the next big wave in
high-performance computing."
The scientists have their eyes on a variety of consumer
hardware, he said. For example Nvidia, the maker of
graphics cards for personal computers, is now selling a
high-performance graphics card that is capable of executing
51 billion mathematical operations a second.
The pace of the consumer computing world is moving so
quickly that the researchers are building the PlayStation
2-based supercomputer as an experiment to see how quickly
they can take advantage of off-the-shelf low-cost
technologies.
"I think we'd like to be able to transfer a lot of our
experience to the next generation," he said.
Despite the computing promise of game consoles that sell
for less than $200, the researchers acknowledged that the
experiment was likely to be most useful for a group of
relatively narrow scientific problems.
They added that while the system was already doing
scientific calculations, they cannot be certain about its
ultimate computing potential until they write more
carefully tuned software routines that can move data in and
out of the custom processor quickly. The limited memory of
the Sony game console - 32 megabytes of memory - would also
restrict the practical applications of the supercomputer,
they said.
But they noted that the computer was already running useful
calculations on quantum chromodynamics, or QCD,
simulations. QCD is a theory concerning the so-called
strong interactions that bind elementary particles like
quarks and gluons together to form hadrons, the
constituents of nuclear matter.
The ability to lower the cost of QCD simulation in itself
would be significant, the researchers said, because such
problems are the single largest consumer of computing
resources on supercomputers at the Department of Energy and
the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
Still, several supercomputer experts said that the memory
and computing bandwidth limitations of the PlayStation
would prohibit broader applications of the machine.
Gordon Bell, a Microsoft computer scientist and a veteran
of the supercomputer world, said the PlayStation
supercomputer might find its best application as a computer
for the large digital display walls that are used by the
Defense Department.
Dr. Bell awards annual computing prizes that include a
category for the best price/performance in high performance
computing. "They should enter my contest," he said.
The supercomputing center scientists said they had chosen
the PlayStation 2 because Sony sells a special Linux module
that includes a high-speed network connection and a disk
drive.
By contrast, it is almost impossible for researchers to
install the Linux system on Microsoft's Xbox game console.
Using a network of machines is not a new concept in the
supercomputing world. Linux, which plays a major role in
that world, has been used to assemble high-performance
parallel computers built largely out of commodity hardware
components. These machines are generally called Beowulf
clusters.
May 26, 2003
By JOHN MARKOFF
As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the computing power
of sophisticated but inexpensive video-game consoles, the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a
supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2's.
The resulting system, with components purchased at retail
prices, cost a little more than $50,000. The center's
researchers believe the system may be capable of a half
trillion operations a second, well within the definition of
supercomputer, although it may not rank among the world's
500 fastest supercomputers.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses
the open source Linux operating system, is that the only
hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the
individual game machines in a rack and plugging them
together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch.
The center's scientists bought 100 machines, but are
holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display
application.
"It took a lot of time because you have to cut all of these
things out of the plastic packaging," said Craig Steffen, a
senior research scientist at the center, who is one of four
scientists working part time on the project.
The scientists are taking advantage of a standard component
of the Sony video-game console that was originally intended
to move and transform pixels rapidly on a television screen
to produce lifelike graphics. The chip is not the
PlayStation 2's MIPS microprocessor, but rather a graphics
co-processor known as the Emotion Engine. That custom
designed silicon chip is capable of producing up to 6.5
billion mathematical operations a second.
The impressive performance of the game machine, which has
been on the market for a few years, underscores a radical
shift that has taken place in the computing world since the
end of the cold war in the late 1980's, according to the
researchers.
While the most advanced computing technologies have
historically been developed first for large corporate users
and military contractors, increasingly the fastest
computers are being developed for the consumer market and
for products meant to be placed under Christmas trees.
"If you look at the economics of game platforms and the
power of computing on toys, this is a long-term market
trend and computing trend," said Dan Reed, the
supercomputing center's director. "The economics are just
amazing. This is going to drive the next big wave in
high-performance computing."
The scientists have their eyes on a variety of consumer
hardware, he said. For example Nvidia, the maker of
graphics cards for personal computers, is now selling a
high-performance graphics card that is capable of executing
51 billion mathematical operations a second.
The pace of the consumer computing world is moving so
quickly that the researchers are building the PlayStation
2-based supercomputer as an experiment to see how quickly
they can take advantage of off-the-shelf low-cost
technologies.
"I think we'd like to be able to transfer a lot of our
experience to the next generation," he said.
Despite the computing promise of game consoles that sell
for less than $200, the researchers acknowledged that the
experiment was likely to be most useful for a group of
relatively narrow scientific problems.
They added that while the system was already doing
scientific calculations, they cannot be certain about its
ultimate computing potential until they write more
carefully tuned software routines that can move data in and
out of the custom processor quickly. The limited memory of
the Sony game console - 32 megabytes of memory - would also
restrict the practical applications of the supercomputer,
they said.
But they noted that the computer was already running useful
calculations on quantum chromodynamics, or QCD,
simulations. QCD is a theory concerning the so-called
strong interactions that bind elementary particles like
quarks and gluons together to form hadrons, the
constituents of nuclear matter.
The ability to lower the cost of QCD simulation in itself
would be significant, the researchers said, because such
problems are the single largest consumer of computing
resources on supercomputers at the Department of Energy and
the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
Still, several supercomputer experts said that the memory
and computing bandwidth limitations of the PlayStation
would prohibit broader applications of the machine.
Gordon Bell, a Microsoft computer scientist and a veteran
of the supercomputer world, said the PlayStation
supercomputer might find its best application as a computer
for the large digital display walls that are used by the
Defense Department.
Dr. Bell awards annual computing prizes that include a
category for the best price/performance in high performance
computing. "They should enter my contest," he said.
The supercomputing center scientists said they had chosen
the PlayStation 2 because Sony sells a special Linux module
that includes a high-speed network connection and a disk
drive.
By contrast, it is almost impossible for researchers to
install the Linux system on Microsoft's Xbox game console.
Using a network of machines is not a new concept in the
supercomputing world. Linux, which plays a major role in
that world, has been used to assemble high-performance
parallel computers built largely out of commodity hardware
components. These machines are generally called Beowulf
clusters.
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