Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with a Cluster of Eight PlayStation 3s

wired.com

11 points·brett··5 comments

PS3s are so good for this because they are sold below cost and are some of the best physics processors anyways. I thought that there might be money in writing some software to allow for easy PS3 clusters and after two more minutes of thinking realized that there was no money it. Still, it's a great example of just how powerful computers are getting.

What stopped me from buying a PS3 just to toy around with it was the fact that (AFAIK) the Linux kernel does not use the special processing units. Basically, I would be buying an under-priced PowerPC.

I do believe that it is getting harder to think of how to make money on things like that because the set of applications that are (as a whole) processor-bound are getting ever smaller. It seems that everything (except videogames, of course) is either memory-bound or IO-bound.

Outside universities, the only people that could be interested in PS3 clusters would be crackers that want to break passwords using brute force.

You can use the SPEs just fine under PS3 Linux - plenty of information on cellperformance.com; access to the GPU (and possibly other juicy parts, like certain IO devices) is restricted (so no hardware acceleration for graphics).

Thanks for the pointer, man.

Suddenly, getting a PS3 got a lot more interesting.

too bad bluray makes up a huge chunk of ps3 production costs... i would imagine for most applications beyond gaming and movies, it's not that useful (if you're trying to use the ps3 for anything but entertainment that is)

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