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New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life)
Digital Life
reports on a cluster based on Linux PlayStation3 platforms.
"When the PlayStation3 was released in November 2006, Gaurav Khanna's wife braved long queues so he could be one of the first people in the US to get his hands on the gaming console.
But the astrophysicist was not itching to burn some rubber in Gran Turismo or shoot hoops in NBA 07. Instead he wanted to build his own supercomputer.
Mr Khanna now owns 16 PS3s, which spend their days simulating the activities of very large black holes in the universe for the physics department at the University of Massachusetts."
(Thanks to Mark Tall).
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New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life) Posted Feb 29, 2008 14:43 UTC (Fri) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] When booted into Linux on a PS3, Does the Cell chip appear as 7 independent processors? Also, is there any sort of driver for 3d graphics?
New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life) Posted Feb 29, 2008 15:07 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] The Linux OS runs inside of a VM on the playstation. Unlike x86 the PPC platform is designed to be easy to virtualize so there is no performance penalty. But because the machine is PPC and the video chipset is Nvidia then, no there is no drivers from Nvidia for them. Nvidia's stuff is x86-only. However there is the Nouveau project and Gallium3D working on drivers for that stuff. 2D support should be there, but 3D stuff is very bleeding edge.
New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life) Posted Mar 6, 2008 3:46 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link] The graphics situation is a bit more complicated than that. Besides the lack of drivers, there is no documented hypervisor interface for gaining access to the 3D hardware, and the methods that were discovered were considered security holes that have been closed by Sony in recent firmware updates.
New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life) Posted Feb 29, 2008 15:22 UTC (Fri) by bangert (subscriber, #28342) [Link] the 8 SPE's are not full processors and have to be programmed specifically. linux only runs on the power cpu which is also on the cell die...
New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life) Posted Feb 29, 2008 19:11 UTC (Fri) by ClarkMills (subscriber, #11490) [Link] Trivia: From what I have read, on the PS3 only 7 of the possible 8 cell processors are enabled. Of that, Linux uses one of the SPUs leaving 6 SPUs for you to use. There is, of course, also the power processor that Linux runs on.
New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life) Posted Mar 6, 2008 3:48 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link] It's the hypervisor that reserves and uses one of the SPUs, not Linux. But you're correct, there are 6 SPUs available to use.
New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life) Posted Feb 29, 2008 19:16 UTC (Fri) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link] Here's a guide on programming the Cell under Linux with the SDK.
New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life) Posted Mar 1, 2008 16:18 UTC (Sat) by guinan (subscriber, #4644) [Link] The Mesa folks (Tungsten mainly) are working on OpenGL for Cell, http://www.mesa3d.org/cell.htmlIt will be interesting to see how this performs.
what can one do with Playstation 3 running Linux? Posted Mar 1, 2008 19:52 UTC (Sat) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] Do people have access to the screen at least for running X windows? The 3d support is being worked on, but hopefully the 2d graphics is available... Also, how programmable are the Cell CPUs under Linux? Can they be used for, say, signal processing?
what can one do with Playstation 3 running Linux? Posted Mar 1, 2008 20:27 UTC (Sat) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link] "how programmable are the Cell CPUs under Linux? Can they be used for, say, signal processing?" Yes.
what can one do with Playstation 3 running Linux? Posted Mar 6, 2008 3:50 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link] > Do people have access to the screen at least for running X windows? Sure. You get a framebuffer interface, with the hypervisor providing hardware-accelerated blits to the graphics card. You can control when the flip occurs and get notified of vsync. Video mode and output format control is also available.
what can one do with Playstation 3 running Linux? Posted Mar 6, 2008 3:53 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link]
Oh, and to answer the subject ("what can one do"), you also have access to wifi, gigabit
ethernet, hard drive, card readers, USB, bluetooth, optical drive, audio output.
New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations (Digital Life) Posted Mar 3, 2008 5:49 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] Instead of the nonexistent University of Massachusetts, they meant University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
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