PS3 cluster creates homemade, cheaper supercomputer

Gaurav Khanna, an astrophysicist working at the university's Dartmouth campus, has been building his own supercomputer of sorts with the popular gaming console.

The professor has been renting time on supercomputers at NASA and the National Science Foundation to run highly complicated calculations on the amount of radiation emitted when a black hole swallows a star. That supercomputing time, though, doesn't come easily or cheap, Khanna said. In an average year, he rents about 30,000 hours, which costs between $20,000 and $30,000, a significant chunk of his grant money.

[FryTheSolid]

It is not that I would like to see a black hole swallowing a star in one of the ps3 games rendered in exact simulated way. It just proves that if you really want to program on ps3, you can do anything you want. It is not that you don't have enough power or that it is too difficult to use. You just need to know what the threads are and how to synchronize them. I do not really see how can you make a game that is single threaded anyway, it is natural way to split the code in threads. Time to hire some programmers? Spaghetti coders are from the past, it is object oriented, multi-threaded era.

Imagine how would a game look like if the current developer teams programmed it for a supercomputer. Stanford bunny hopping at 10fps... Supercomputers are so last gen...

[AIZEN SOZUKE]

ps3 is a supercomputer alone, and where did you get supercomputers are last gen? if supercomputers are last gen, then there is no next gen

[FryTheSolid]

Don't go bankai on me... It is just that the sarcasms gets lost over internet. What you said is also exactly my point, the supercomputers set the horizon where all of the computers evolve to (yes, the game consoles are computers too, after all they perform computations). If that is the future of the computers, the developers need to go with time and evolve too and stop complaining on how hard it is to program on the ps3. It is just the learning curve, once you figure it out, it is not harder than programming for anything else.

It is just so incredible how close the ps3 comes to a supercomputer, thats all. Plenty of power to use. I really would like to see it in action.

[xg-ei8ht]

What he meant was, You need need a supercomputer as such,Nasa,etc etc.

You can just hook up 8 ps3's and get the same compute power etc.

Its all interesting anyway.

[nix]

"Calculations that would take nearly a year to finish on a desktop computer are being done by the cell chip array in less than a day."