PS3 supercomputer
A computer scientist at North Carolina State University has built a supercomputer using eight PS3s. Dr. Frank Mueller, an associate professor, claim that the PS3 cluster is capable of doing calculation similar to that of small supercomputer. Although the eight cluster computer does not reach the capability of top 500 supercomputers, 10,000 PS3 could make the fastest supercomputer in the world.
?Scientific computing is just number crunching, which the PS3s are very good at given the Cell processor and deploying them in a cluster,? Mueller says. ?Right now one limitation is the 512 megabyte RAM memory constraint, but it might be possible to retrofit more RAM. We just haven?t cracked the case and explored that option yet.? Another problem lies in limited speed for double-precision calculations required by scientific applications, but announcements for the next-generation Cell processor address this issue.
?In the computing world there is a list of the top 500 fastest computers,? Mueller says. Currently the fastest is BlueGene/L, a supercomputer with more than 130,000 processors at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The PS3 cluster at NC State does not break into the top 500, but Mueller estimates that with approximately 10,000 PS3 machines anyone could create the fastest computer in the world ? albeit with limited single-precision capabilities and networking constraints.?
Of course, the PS3 supercomputer is only used for academic purpose. What a waste!
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