PS3 supercomputer

[Dibbs]

Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with a Cluster of Eight PlayStation 3s

 

[Joy Pathak]

Used PS3 clusters to run my CFD simulations.

 

[Dibbs]

Thats insane, how do these compare with GPU computing ?

 

[Joy Pathak]

I liked GPU computing more.

I think the US Air force has a massive 300 PS3 cluster.

 

[AlexandreB]

"But the desire to play games is not the reason why the United States Air Force recently issued a procurement request for 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) video-game consoles. It intends to link them up to build a supercomputer that will run Linux, a free, open-source operating system. It will be used for research, including the development of high-definition imaging systems for radar, and will cost around one-tenth as much as a conventional supercomputer. The air force has already built a smaller computer from a cluster of 336 PS3s."

the Economist, December 12th-18th 2009, p. 89

 

[Andy Nguyen]

This article was published 3 years ago. During that time, hardware got cheaper (they always do), supercomputer is more affordable and I don't believe people are using PS3 anymore. There are simply much more scalable alternatives.

Amazon, Google and many big firms are getting into the cloud computing service. You can rent 100s of nodes online to create a supercomputer, run your experiment and pay only for what you use.

for example, cloud hosting like vps.net can rent you nodes per month. You can get up to 18 nodes (10.8Ghz, 6768MB ram) for $234/month.

 

[atreides]

"But the desire to play games is not the reason why the United States Air Force recently issued a procurement request for 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) video-game consoles. It intends to link them up to build a supercomputer that will run Linux, a free, open-source operating system. It will be used for research, including the development of high-definition imaging systems for radar, and will cost around one-tenth as much as a conventional supercomputer. The air force has already built a smaller computer from a cluster of 336 PS3s."

the Economist, December 12th-18th 2009, p. 89

The IBM Road Runner super computer used a ton of those cell processors

 

[Joy Pathak]

Ontario universities use the Sharknet system to put their computing jobs on there and use the larger computing power for a fee.

 

[alain]

as far as I know. "the cell" is dead

 

[quantstart]

I would imagine that GPU computing makes PS3 supercomputers redundant. Fermi is designed for this sort of work, whereas a PS3 is not.

 

[joel_b]

I'm just getting around to putting an OS on my PS3 now, since I found out my pending firmware update is going to remove this feature. I need to crunch some intraday one-minute bar data :p

what is everhyone using? I was just going to go with YDL, but I see there are also Ubuntu and Fedora releases. Opinions?

Thanks!

 

[Noko]

what is everhyone using? I was just going to go with YDL, but I see there are also Ubuntu and Fedora releases. Opinions?

I read an article a couple days ago in Linux Journal about setting up a cluster using Eucalyptus on Ubuntu Server Edition.
I've used Ubuntu Server Edition before, and if you're new to CLI operating systems, I'd say it's a great place to start.