We’ve routinely joked in the past about “playstation® Climatology”, a phrase coined by JunkScience.com a few years back in response to the constant barrage of model output from supercomputers worldwide that forecast doom and gloom ahead for the human condition if we don’t repent and stop our use of fire.
Well now, the Air Force’s Research Lab in Rome, NY actually went and made a PS3 based supercomputer.
The Air Force’s Research Lab in Rome, NY. has one of the cheapest supercomputers ever made, and best of all over 3,000 of your friends can play Tekken on it. The computer is made from 1,716 PlayStation 3s linked together, and is used to process images from spy planes. From the article: “The Air Force calls the souped-up PlayStations the Condor Supercomputer and says it is among the 40 fastest computers in the world. The Condor went online late last year, and it will likely change the way the Air Force and the Air National Guard watch things on the ground.
Here’s the systems before they were wired up:
Here’s what the Air Force says about the computing power:
53 TERAFLOPS Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Cluster: This cluster
enabled early access to IBM’s CBE® chip technology included
in the low priced commodity PS3 gaming consoles. This is a
heterogeneous cluster with powerful sub-cluster head nodes. The
cluster is comprised of 14 sub-clusters, each with 24 PS3s, and
one server containing dual quad-core Xeon chips.
Full writeup here
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Nope, it’s not a joke in any sense of the word. As I remember it, the playstations have vector processors in them which is what are used in supercomputers anyway. Instead of a specially made computer, using off the shelf components makes a lot of sense. Shows what is really driving technology in that area now (games and video).
This kind of thing can be done for specific applications.
For example, number cruncher CPUs don’t necessarily have good I/O capabilities. For crunching cache usually is more important. It’s all about what you are trying to run on the system.
I love the hitech racks 🙂
Looks like the food service racks we modified for display use in our C-store, $79 at Costco.
Rumor has it that this supercomputer has been starting to link up with other playstations around the country, and has started to refer to itself as “SkyNet.”
US air force calls for mission to combat climate change
No kidding.
The before pictures are always more awesome than the after pictures. So tomorrow it’s gonna be a picture of a barfed upon TI-82 with a leaking battery. :p
Ironic though, considering the DDOS attack, is that US Air force, several years ago, had the idea that it could be wise to be able to do pre-emptive DDOS attacks when they found it to be necessary, even against friendlies. Maybe they’ll be able to, once they put all them (from 7 years of age) pieces together. :p
I worked at a couple of computer companies during their transition from single tasking to multi tasking operating systems. A peek at the interface code is bound to be interesting…
I already have the wire shelving for them, but will it run off of my 15A circuit in the living room?
Is it Move compatible?
Yeah but a bet the controllers have flat batteries.
People have been using Playstations for scientific computing for about four years. Video games do similar calculations to many scientific applications.
When the Imacs first came out I remember that someone at (I think it was) Berkely put together a cluster of 800 (or so) of the boxes off the shelf to make one of the premier academic supercomputers in the world, for about 1% of the price of any competing machines. Cost is the key here. One of the downsides to such machines is the lag in board-to-board communication. Whether this is a critical problem depends heavily on the kind of programming being used. If it is highly parallel or something that can be distributed and farmed out to slave processors then this is an ideal architecture. If it requires constant, arbitrary-host communication, then it fails badly. Image processing and partial differential equation solving, I think, works nicely on these units.
One thing I would have changed in the setup shown, is to remove the boxes altogether. Strip off any extraneous hardware, and add external cooling — a large fan at the end of each rack would extend the life of the machine and minimize problems. I presume they used high-end, shielded cables to reduce the need for error-correction. Optical communication would be even better, but this is not in evidence, else they would probably have ditched the boxes as I mention above. So my thought is that this is pretty good for a quickly tossed-together unit, but they could probably fine-tune it without too much overhead.
This was done a couple of years back by a university too
Now that’s thinking out of The Box. 😉
BarryW;
As I remember it, the playstations have vector processors in them which is what are used in supercomputers anyway.>>>
Oddly, you’re wrong but right (now anyway).
Vector processors pretty much went away as an approach to HPC (high performance computing) quite a few years ago. They couldn’t compete on performance or cost with stacks of general purpose servers and software tweaked to break workload up across all the servers.
Then along comes the gaming industry, with trillions of dollars at stake for the best whiz bang graphics. The game console makers sunk big dollars into purpose built chips to do the graphics calculations as fast as possible. The chips are useless as computer processors in the usual sense, but the computer processor can offload those graphics calcs to the GPU. The GPU does those calcs orders of magnitude faster than the cpu can.
And since the calcs we’re talking about are floating point…bingo! New way to turbo charge an HPC cluster. HOWEVER, the code the researchers wrote to run on 1700 servers won’t run on 1700 PS3’s without some modification. What kind of mods?
Well…if you’ve got some old vector processing programmers hanging around…they’ll pretty much know what to do.
This idea isn’t original; if I remember correctly, a group of young European geeks used the insane power of a half-dozen or so PS3s to definitively break one of the (admittedly lower-level) US DoD-approved cryptographic algorithms. (Anybody have a link?)
We’ve known for a long time that the humongous increases in speed of our graphics processors over the last decade — orders of magnitude more than increases in CPU power — have been driven exclusively by the gamers, not by the staid and serious design engineers sitting at their CAD drafting boards. So why should we be surprised when one group of geeks gets Linux to run on a PS3, and then another group adapts Linux’ vast interface riches to do serious work?
It’s a good thing they didn’t use Microsoft’s Xbox, or the whole military grid would crash every once in a while.
The Chinese made what they claim is the fastest computer in the world from PC graphics cards.
I love it.
A Super Computer for under 300.000 us dollar.
Very clever.
They’d want that room well ventilated – my PS3 overheats so much i can’t have it in the TV unit anymore. Especially playing Fallout 3 New Vegas.
J Felton says:
March 23, 2011 at 9:48 pm
It’s a good thing they didn’t use Microsoft’s Xbox, or the whole military grid would crash every once in a while.
Actually my PS3 crashes more than my Xbox 360 (the new models are much better than the old red ring of death models that first came out)
I wonder if they can replace these when one breaks-down?
Have Sony changed their policy on disabling other OS installs in future?
The question was pondered in Micromart (issue 1107 20-26 May 2010) in relation to this particular use.
I’ve forwarded a link to this article to the U.K. Met Office. That way they will only waste £200,000-odd of taxpayer’s money instead of the £30,000,000 + they are begging for.
@ur momisugly R.Craigen: The PS3 depends on its case for cooling, and it’s cooling setup is more than adequate, considering they won’t be using any of the GPU capability of these machines. High-end or optical cabling isn’t necessary either, and retrofitting different networking capabilities into the machines would defeat the purpose of using cheap consumer parts in the first place. The PS3 uses gigabit Ethernet, which is probably plenty stable and fast for such a “small” application.
@ur momisuglydavidmhoffer: In turn, you’re right, but you’re still wrong. A lot of high perfomance computing these days is leveraging GPU resources, like nVidia’s CUDA, OpenCL, AMD’s Stream, and Microsoft’s DirectCompute, but the PS3 hypervisor doesn’t permit user-installed operating systems to access the GPU, nor is the nVidia-based GPU in the PS3 capable of being utilized in that manner (too old). Supercomputing applications of the PS3 rely entirely on the PS3’s single dual-threaded IBM Power -based PPU and the six available SPU vector processors, aka the CELL Broadband Engine.
Ironically, it was this ability for the user to load their own operating system onto the PS3 that made it easier for hackers to try to break the system’s hypervisor open and gain access to the deeper and more sensitive parts of the system, which in turn led Sony to remove the capability to install other operating systems in the first place in later firmware updates, and which in turn “made” (air quotes intentional) the hackers respond by attacking the security of the PS3 even more vehemently, ending with the security of the PS3 being briefly rendered completely broken wide open.