Why scientists love games consoles

[SteveThaiBinh]

Leading scientists are turning to the extraordinary power of games consoles to do their sums and simulate everything from colliding black holes to the effects of drugs.

 

Reprogram a PlayStation and it will perform feats that would be unthinkable on an ordinary PC because the kinds of calculations required to produce the realistic graphics now seen in sophisticated video games are similar to those used by chemists and physicists as they simulate the interactions between particles ranging from the molecular to the astronomical.

advertisement

 

Such simulations are usually carried out on a supercomputer, but time on these machines is expensive and in short supply. By comparison, games consoles are cheap and easily available, says New Scientist.

 

"There is no doubt that the entertainment industry is helping to drive the direction of high performance computational science - exploiting the power available to the masses will lead to many research breakthroughs in the future," comments Prof Peter Coveney of University College London, who uses supercomputing in chemistry.

 

Prof Gaurav Khanna at the University of Massachusetts has used an array of 16 PS3s to calculate what will happen when two black holes merge.

 

According to Prof Khanna, the PS3 has unique features that make it suitable for scientific computations, namely, the Cell processor dubbed a "supercomputer-on-a-chip." And it runs on Linux, "so it does not limit what you can do."

 

"A single high-precision simulation can sometimes cost more than 5,000 hours on the TeraGrid supercomputers. For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer using PS3s. It works just as well, has no long wait times and can be used over and over again, indefinitely," Prof Khanna says.

 

The Daily Telegraph

[Pop]

Joystiq's been fapping about PS3 Home's "protein folding" function for awhile now.

[Meshugger]

I for one, is using the "THE POWER OF THE CELL" for my master's thesis. I am programming for the playstation 3 (C with IBM CBE libraries) in order to explore the use streaming, parallel dataflows, compared to traditional sequential programming. It is used as a tool for a larger project.

 

Difficult to get used to, but the results are impressive.

 

"And why not the Xbox360?", as a layman would say. There aren't simply any tools for the Xbox360 for public use in order to explicitly map the different cores.

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

The PS3 is more useful to society as a scientific tool, than a games console.

[Krookie]

It's not really a "game" console considering there aren't any games out for it

[Nick_i_am]

You know, this reminds me of that cirtain type of person who spends their whole live in a corprate setting trying to get up the ladder, then find their 'true calling' and go off and become an alternative healer or some other kind of hippy.

 

Follow your heart PS3, follow your heart!

[Kaftan Barlast]

We did some experiments with this and the PS3 is pretty much useless as a cluster node, because it only has 512mb of memory and the CELL CPU is no match for dual or quadruple Intel Xeon setups.

[Meshugger]

We did some experiments with this and the PS3 is pretty much useless as a cluster node, because it only has 512mb of memory and the CELL CPU is no match for dual or quadruple Intel Xeon setups.

 

There's also the cost/performance ratio. A PS3 is 479 euro, compared to a Quad-Xeon processor, which costs 879 euro.

[Gorgon]

Very old news

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

It's not really a "game" console considering there aren't any games out for it

 

hence why it's more useful to scientists

 

Some guys did some real time ray tracing on 3 PS3's... Which frankly seems like a waste of time.

Edited February 18, 2008 by @\NightandtheShape/@