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 shewitt-au rated 10 months ago- From the page: "Moving beyond being a more-than-capable multimedia player, Sony's PlayStation 3 has proven itself to be very useful even in the field of science. Eight PS3s clustered together are helping scientist Dr. Gaurav Khanna investigate the gravity waves that are supposed to emerge ...
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16 Reviews
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- Capn-Slappy rated 10 months ago
- The PS3: Great if you want to work out the physics of a black hole's gravity, but wouldn't recommend using it to play games though.
 Jim-B rated 10 months ago- Biased as shit.
- BigLeon rated 10 months ago
- Wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy the individual parts and putting the computer together yourself? a la Google.
- dirtbagbubble rated 10 months ago
- Clustering Playstations has been done by scientists since the Playstation 2 era. Buying PS3s is apparently cheaper than buying Cell blades from IBM. If it were the other way around, this story's scientist wouldn't bother with PS3s at all.
The Cell was designed with parallel computing and scalability in mind, so there's nothing to wonder about. A Cell compiler is also freely available under Linux for a while.
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/ gives an interesting read on that matter from IBM's perspective.
However, the article has a sensationalist tone and most likely puts the figures into a wrong context. I also don't believe, that a whole super computer costs just $5,000. It is more likely, that this is the cost of a single Cell server blade by IBM, but this doesn't hold true, either. It is actually about $10,000: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/cell-based.html
- edwinpeng rated 10 months ago
- they've been doing this for a while.. .well not really. you know, fold at home? yeah, that helps with medical research... and it's already on your ps3!
- xSutures rated 10 months ago
- From the page: "Moving beyond being a more-than-capable multimedia player, Sony's PlayStation 3 has proven itself to be very useful even in the field of science. Eight PS3s clustered together are helping scientist Dr. Gaurav Khanna investigate the gravity waves that are supposed to emerge once a massive black hole swallows up a star."
So.. he plans to throw them into the black hole to see how long it takes for them to be crushed into oblivion? Neato!
- TheGZeus rated 10 months ago
- Hmm.
I can't tell if they had the supercomputer and replaced it, or if the were going to get one and bought this in its stead.
In any case, this is a far better application for the hardware in that thing. Terrible game system, great science tool. I know someone who does advanced physical modeling with one. He loves that processor.
He works at the University of Minnesota. Don't remember the division, but its research(duh).
However, it would be a much more viable tool if they'd remove the hypervisor from it, and let linux touch the A/V hardware. A good number of calculations could be done on the video hardware, and there's 256mb more ram to work with.
Why are people thumbing this down?
It's neat, if written in slightly off english, by american standards.
- origin415 rated 10 months ago
- I'm really curious if were ever going to see Cells alongside AMDs and Intels in the desktop computer market...I have personally strongly considered buying a PS3 just to make a desktop computer out of it
- shewitt-au rated 10 months ago
- From the page: "Moving beyond being a more-than-capable multimedia player, Sony's PlayStation 3 has proven itself to be very useful even in the field of science. Eight PS3s clustered together are helping scientist Dr. Gaurav Khanna investigate the gravity waves that are supposed to emerge once a massive black hole swallows up a star."
- rivermyst666 rated 10 months ago
- Absolute fucking bullshit. Explain to me how this works more than a supercomputer, and how a supercomputer costs $5000.
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