How To Build a Homebrew PS3 Cluster Supercomputer

eldavojohn writes "UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide designed to show you how to build your own supercomputer for about $4,000. They are also hoping that by publishing this guide they will bring about a new kind of software development targeting this architecture & grid (I know a few failed NLP projects of my own that could use some new hardware). If this catches on for research institutions it may increase Sony's sales, but they might not be seeing the corresponding sale of games spike (where they make the most profit)."

Oblig. OMG...

[Anonymous Coward]

something to finally run Vista?

Re:Oblig. OMG...

[windsurfer619]

At first I laughed... But then I realized that, no, Vista won't be able to run on this.

Vista doesn't support the PowerPC architecture.

ibm

[sreid]

why would ibm be involved in this if it means they will sell less servers?

Re:ibm

[oodaloop]

FEWER servers! FEWER! Aauughhhh!

Re:ibm

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't really the place to start criticizing grammar and spelling, unless you REALLY want to live a life full of frustration and torment....?

(Though it could be worse, I suppose - you could go to digg etc. intsead...:p)

Re:ibm

[Grimbleton]

Or YouTube

Re:ibm

[rhsanborn]

It's showcasing the usefulness of IBM's cell processors for exactly this kind of thing. They have very good reason to be involved as it may mean that there is interest in using their processors for smaller computers at a higher volume to do modeling and research.

Re:ibm

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

IBM is probably banking on the existence of people who want Cell processors in systems with more than 256megs of RAM. Other IBM value-adds would presumably include rack mountability, support for netbooting and other convenient management stuff, and so forth.

If your application leans almost entirely on the CPU with very little need for RAM, and you have an army of screwdriver monkeys(or grad students) to do all the legwork, the PS3 is an excellent deal. If you need something with RAM capacity that wasn't a joke in 2001, and/or management features that won't have you tearing your eyes out when you have 10,000 of them, then IBM smells opportunity.

Re:ibm

[dbIII]

If you wait out the two weeks of used car salesman tactics from a place like Mercury that can sell you cell processors in systems with more than 256megs of RAM you'll find out that unless you have an endless budget you are probably better off with the ten quad core Xeon systems you could get for the same price.

That is why a system made of game consoles makes a lot more sense than very similar hardware in a rackmount case. Other cell hardware has been priced into complete irrelevance by salesfolk having too much control over the process.

On the other hand there is the nvidia CUDA solutions, hardware doing things a slightly different way but proudly printing their prices on the net instead of two weeks of mindless chatty emails before you get the price.

Re:ibm

[Enderandrew]

IBM is the first company to see the writing on the wall and invest in new markets, even if those markets invalidate their current holdings. They went from a typewriter company, to a mainframe company, and an operating system company, to a PC company, to a server company, to a virtualization company, and now a SaaS company.

Re:ibm

[Skjellifetti]

They had to do that because there is a world market for maybe five computers [wikipedia.org] so none of those markets were going to last very long.

Subsidized Supercomputers

[MeanMF]

Does Sony make any money on PS3 hardware sales? Last I heard they were selling them at around $100 under the cost of production.

Re:Subsidized Supercomputers

[Shados]

I dont know about the newer models without the backward compatibility and stuff, but previously, they were definately net loss. The -last- thing Sony wants is to sell a million PS3 with 0 attach rate. Of course, those numbers would still count to impress developers, and may be a catalyst, but....

Re:Subsidized Supercomputers

[timeOday]

The number of PS3's sold will never be enough to hurt Sony's bottom line, but will boost the image of the console. Having credible scientists call your product a "supercomputer" is worth something. Does Ferrari's Forumla 1 racing team pay for itself? Nah, it's an investment to promote an image.

Re:Subsidized Supercomputers

[Bearhouse]

Does Ferrari's Forumla 1 racing team pay for itself? Nah, it's an investment to promote an image.

Most of the budget is paid for by sponsors.

Re:Subsidized Supercomputers

[Grimbleton]

Who sponsor them based... on an image that's promoted ;)

Re:Subsidized Supercomputers

[makapuf]

AGAIN, revenue of console sales is not N*const (positive or negative), but const1+N*const2 where const2 is negative (it's a gain per console) but upfront costs=const1(R&D, licences ...) are big. So the fact that the total is negative implies const is negative, but in fact it's mostly that N*const2 is still less than const1. (I hope this makes sense to some at least)

Re:Subsidized Supercomputers

[nasch]

When someone mentions a product as losing money, they're usually talking about negative marginal revenue. After all, a brand-new fantastically profitable product will often be "losing money" at the beginning if you count fixed costs, but nobody would describe it so.

Re:Subsidized Supercomputers

[Spatial]

The Wii is the only current generation console sold at a profit.

Re:Subsidized Supercomputers

[CronoCloud]

Meaning the 80GB systems are NOT 100% backwards-compatible.

Not 100% but very still very high. Out of my collection of 64 PS2 games, only 2 have enough problems that I consider them unplayable on the PS3: Tekken Tag Tournament (doesn't run full speed) and Fallout Brotherhood of Steel (with very pronounced texture glitching)

But now, the PS3 ships without hardware or software emulation to play PS2/PS1 games.

Sigh, why do people keep getting this wrong. Although the latest release PS3 consoles can't play PS2 games, ALL PS3's can play PS1 games since that's entirely software emulation.

Why use PS3s?

[JanusFury]

Why would you want to use PS3s for a homebrew supercomputing cluster if it means you have to write and optimize code for the SPEs to get benefit out of it? The PS3's linux environment doesn't let you utilize the GPU or all of the built-in SPEs and it doesn't have a lot of RAM available either. It seems like it would be cheaper to build a cluster out of commodity PC parts, and maybe use GPUs+CUDA to get more muscle without having to completely hand-roll your own accelerated computation code (since CUDA is roughly C). I can't imagine that the PS3 would end up cheaper for these purposes, considering it includes a Blu-Ray player along with a bunch of other things you're not going to be using.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[Darkness404]

....About the cheapest computer you can build/buy that would be of any use as a supercomputer would be $200, add in a $150 GPU, and thats $350, about the price of a used PS3. Most supercomputers need fast CPUs, not a ton of RAM (though, the more RAM the better), and so it becomes that a PS3 is about the same as doing it with commodity computers only the PS3 has a much faster CPU.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[JDevers]

Well, that is all true except most simulations eat a ton of RAM (we aren't comparing 20 GB to 25GB here, the PS3 has 256MB of memory) and the PS3 does NOT have a faster CPU. If you think it does, look at the folding@home stats for a PS3 versus a mid/high end GPU. The GPUs are really what are interesting here, the main CPUs of both systems are slow enough to make them of no interest when only talking 8-20 units...

From the folding@home Wiki:
as of August 24, 2008, GPU clients accounted for the majority of entire project's throughputâ"over 1.8 petaFLOPs of computational powerâ"at an approximate ratio of 9 clients per teraFLOP

On April 26, 2007, Sony released a new version of Folding@home which improved folding performance drastically, such that the updated PS3 clients produced 1500 teraFLOPS with 52,000 clients versus the previous 400 teraFLOPS by around 24,000 clients.[22] Lately, the console accounts for around 40% of all teraFLOPS at an approximate ratio of 35½ PS3 clients per teraFLOPS.

So using those numbers, the PS3 is about a fourth as powerful as the average GPU running folding@home, and of course we know that the average GPU isn't nearly as fast as the fastest available.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[CronoCloud]

Yes, the GPU client is faster, but it's limited to the kinds of WU's it can do, compared to the PS3 client, as the FAH site says:

What type of calculations the PS3 client is capable of running?

The PS3 right now runs what are called implicit solvation calculations, including some simple ones (sigmodal dependent dielectric) and some more sophisticated ones (AGBNP, a type of Generalized Born method from Prof. Ron Levy's group at Rutgers). In this respect, the PS3 client is much like our GPU client. However, the PS3 client is more flexible, in that it can also run explicit solvent calculations as well, although not at the same speed increase relative to PC's. We are working to increase the speed of explicit solvent on the PS3 and would then run these calculations on the PS3 as well. In a nutshell, the PS3 takes the middle ground between GPU's (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WU's).

It seems that the PS3 is more than 10X as powerful as an average PC. Why doesn't it get 10X PPD as well?

We balance the points based on both speed and the flexibility of the client. The GPU client is still the fastest, but it is the least flexible and can only run a very, very limited set of WUs. Thus, its points are not linearly proportional to the speed increase. The PS3 takes the middle ground between GPUs (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WUs). We have picked the PS3 as the natural benchmark machine for PS3 calculations and set its points per day to 900 to reflect this middle ground between speed (faster than CPU, but slower than GPU) and flexibility (more flexible than GPU, less than CPU).

The PS3 is outrunning all the rest of the FAH client types. Should I stop my existing PC/GPU/... FAH clients?

NO. The other clients are valuable to us too and we have chosen a points system to try to reflect the relative merits of each different platform to our scientific research. For example, the SMP client has been producing some very exciting scientific results and continues to be very important in our work. By supporting machines with lots of different functionality, we have a very rich set of hardware on which to run varied types of calculations, allowing us to tailor calculations to the hardware to achieve maximum performance.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[afidel]

The best MIPS/watt for CUDA is probably either the 9600 GSO or the GTX280 depending on whether you're memory or processor constrained. The 9600 can be had for about $75 for 768MB variety (forget the 512/1024 parts they much lower performing) and has 96 stream processors running at up to 650Mhz. The GTX280 costs about $400 and has 240 650Mhz stream processors (though I believe they might be slightly more advanced then the ones on the 9600 I'm not sure how much of that is exposed by CUDA). Power usage is 46W peak for the 9600 and 180W for the GTX280.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[drinkypoo]

Why would you want to use PS3s for a homebrew supercomputing cluster if it means you have to write and optimize code for the SPEs to get benefit out of it? The PS3's linux environment doesn't let you utilize the GPU or all of the built-in SPEs and it doesn't have a lot of RAM available either.

Well, I'll bite; if the cell is the fastest processor for your workload, the PS3 is the cheapest way to get one, even at only six usable SPEs and no GPU. Doesn't the PS3 have GigE? That's plenty fast enough to shovel data in and out of the system.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[Chandon Seldon]

Well, I'll bite; if the cell is the fastest processor for your workload, the PS3 is the cheapest way to get one, even at only six usable SPEs and no GPU. Doesn't the PS3 have GigE? That's plenty fast enough to shovel data in and out of the system.

What workload is actually faster on a Cell than on a modern quad-core CPU or video card? I mean - it's possible that such a workload exists, but the niche between a general purpose CPU and the hundreds of FPUs in a video card has got to be pretty damn small.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[ookabooka]

If I recall correctly, Sony sells hardware either at-cost or at a slight loss because they make their money on the games. I know this was true for the original xbox as modded xbox clusters were demoed as extremely cost efficient compared to making the computers yourself. I used a moded xbox as an early TiVO as it was way cheaper than making a similar setup myself.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[rm999]

Yeah, but a large part of the cost is the bluray player, which is useless in a supercomputer. I guess you could probably sell the drive/laser for 100 bucks to offset your costs.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[Bearhouse]

Or keep it in, and use your cluster to break the encryption, rip and recode the Blueray disk.

As per:

http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/index.cipp [exit1.org]

The PS3 cluster uses Fedora, so how about it someone (more talented than me)?

Re:Why use PS3s?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The Blu-Ray drive and the controller are the only things in the system you won't really use, at least much. The rest of the system is a computer, even if it is an unusual architecture. I don't know if the system can install an OS over a USB drive or CF card vs. optical disc, I've never tried to install Linux.

I'd say it's a very powerful computer for $400, assuming you can program for it.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[ASBands]

since CUDA is roughly C

Not quite. CUDA looks a lot like C in that it has C-family syntax but the biggest limitation it has is that there is no application stack - which means no recursion. CUDA also lacks the idea of a pointer, although you can bypass this by doing number to address translation (as in, the number 78 means look up tex2D(tex, 0.7, 0.8)). The GPU also has other shortcomings, in that most architectures like to have all their shaders running the same instruction at the same time. For this code

if (pixel.r < pixel.g){
//do stuff A
}else if (pixel.g < pixel.b){
//do stuff B
}else{
//do stuff C
}

The GPU will slow down a ton if the pixel color causes different pixels to branch in different directions. Basically, the three sets of shaders following different branches of that code will be inactive 2/3 of the time.

In the Cell, you really do just program in C with a number of extensions added onto it like the SPE SIMD intrinsics and the DMA transfer commands (check it out [ibm.com]). The Cell really is 9 (10 logical) processors all working together in a single chip (except in PS3, where there are only 7 working SPEs). Furthermore, your 8 SPEs can be running completely different programs -- they're just little processors. Granted, you have to be smart when you program them to deal with race conditions and all the other crap you have to deal with for multithreaded programming. The Cell takes about 14 times longer to calculate a double precision floating point than a single (and there aren't SPE commands to do four at once like you can with singles).

So which is more powerful? It really depends what you're doing. If your task is ridiculously parallellizable and doesn't require the use of recursion, pointers or multiple branches, the GPU is most likely your best bet. If your program falls into any of those categories, use a Cell.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[forkazoo]

Not quite. CUDA looks a lot like C in that it has C-family syntax but the biggest limitation it has is that there is no application stack - which means no recursion. CUDA also lacks the idea of a pointer, although you can bypass this by doing number to address translation (as in, the number 78 means look up tex2D(tex, 0.7, 0.8)). The GPU also has other shortcomings, in that most architectures like to have all their shaders running the same instruction at the same time. For this code

if (pixel.r

Yeah, you wind up with some strange idioms on parallel systems like that which would be insanely idiotic on a more ordinary platform... (Just a random example based on your example which avoids branches. Depending on the actual task, there are probably better ways to do this.)

A = (pixel.r pixel.g){
Aresult = //do stuff A
}

B = (pixel.g pixel.b){
Bresult = //do stuff B
}

C = (pixel.g==pixel.b){
Cresult = //do stuff C
}

answer = A*Aresult + B*Bresult + Cresult*C;

That way, you are brute forcing your way through three times as much work that you should need to do, but you avoid branches. If the A condition is false, then you multiply Aresult by zero. The strange hoops you have to jump through on these types of platforms are why you should always take vendor press releases with a certain grain of salt...

Re:Why use PS3s?

[kramulous]

Not that I am, but if I was some home/small business artist/modeller who needed some serious render time to generate the frames of a computer animated movie/demo, I'd be making one of these clusters ... It would be perfect for this kind of thing.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[afidel]

Nope, not nearly enough ram for even a moderately complex scene's geometry let alone the textures unless you want your output looking like a game (IE most graphic artists will want photorealistic output which is more than a game console is capable of).

Re:Why use PS3s?

[J05H]

Depends on the specific code - to my knowledge no one has written/ported a 3d renderer to the PS3Cluster architecture yet - so you should get to work on it. 8) To get realistic textures does require a lot of RAM or a lot of swapping. One thing that could help in this context is to have a big block of NAS on the same network - and treat part of it as a RAM disk or texture buffer. Not necessarily efficient but could work following any of several weird render schemes.

I only suggest the block of external storage because I know that is part of Dr. Khanna's setup and it works.

Josh

Re:Why use PS3s?

[J05H]

When I installed linux+MPI on the test PS3 it recognized all the processors - pretty cool seeing 8 little penguins pop up. From what Chris said the programming is fairly generic C/C++ to utilize the whole console. It's apparently not that hard and PS3s are dirt cheap (compared to supercomputers or even blade servers).

Josh

Re:Why use PS3s?

[MikeBabcock]

Feel free not to believe it, but actually doing your research might be smarter.

And which part of the GPU not being fully exposed to Linux is relevant to supercomputing exactly?

Re:Why use PS3s?

[TrancePhreak]

The part that can run extra instructions on the GPU, doubling your available computing power.

Re:Why use PS3s?

[myvirtualid]

Why would you want to use PS3s for a homebrew supercomputing cluster

IIRC, a general purpose CPU has a small data cache and a large instruction cache, coz you can never be 100% sure which instruction is likely to be executed next. PS3s have large data caches and small instruction caches, because they spend much of their time executing a small number of instructions over a large set of data, that is, graphics rendering.

If you are doing any sort of mathematical simulation, you can likely express your numerical methods in a relatively small set of instructions. And you are likely going to have hoards and scads and barrels of data.

Machines like the PS3 are perfectly suited to number crunching. If only there were some way to kit them into a Beowulf cluster....

Again, IIRC, this was the original motivation for porting Linux to the PS2 before the official kit came out: Because a cluster of PS2s running Linux made for a far faster number cruncher than anything else available for a comparable price (or a price within an order or two of magnitude).

As for writing and optimizing code, well, let's just say you made my eyes bug out with that one. If you are doing any serious supercomputing, you are ALWAYS writing and optimizing code: The point is to get the fastest possible execution so you can crunch the greatest amount of data possible and get the best possible results from your work.

In serious number crunching, the effort spent coding and optimizing is almost always going to pay off.

Why PS3s?

[whyloginwhysubscribe]

I don't understand why this isn't possible with normal PC hardware - what is special about the PS3 - or is it just because it is better value for money?

Re:Why PS3s?

[Darkness404]

A) Although the cell is a pain to code for, it is much better than whatever PC you can get for ~$400 which will probably contain a mid-to-low-range dual core x86 CPU, whereas the PS3 gives you a Cell CPU which is much, much, faster than the x86 CPU.

B) PS3s are uniform. Other than HD differences, a PS3 built in 2008 will be the same PS3 built in 2012 (assuming the PS3 lasts that long) this allows for a uniform cluster without worrying about differing parts (for example, the Core i7 built in 2008 will not be the same as the Core i7 built in 2012 and getting a 2008 Core i7 is going to be a pain)

C) PS3s are the new fad. It isn't going to be hard to set up a supercomputer cluster with PS3s compared to using a mismatch of older computers because again, the PS3 is uniform.

Re:Why PS3s?

[Richard_at_work]

B) PS3s are uniform. Other than HD differences, a PS3 built in 2008 will be the same PS3 built in 2012 (assuming the PS3 lasts that long) this allows for a uniform cluster without worrying about differing parts (for example, the Core i7 built in 2008 will not be the same as the Core i7 built in 2012 and getting a 2008 Core i7 is going to be a pain)

Don't rely on this - there are large hardware differences between early PS2 and later PS2 models as manufacturing tweaks and cost reduction packages were applied to the production process, to the extent where some games refused to run and some features were changed. I don't expect Sony to act any differently with the PS3.

What about those junk PIIs?

[bogaboga]

I wonder whether this how-to will enable me build a cluster consisting of PIIs. I have 11 lying around.

Re:What about those junk PIIs?

[armanox]

Yes and no. The concepts are the same, but I'd use a more lightweight distrobution then Fedora to do it on P3's (I've got a stack of P3 1GHz laying around too)

Re:What about those junk PIIs?

[meringuoid]

I wonder whether this how-to will enable me build a cluster consisting of PIIs. I have 11 lying around.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.

Then build one.

I doubt the performance will be awfully impressive by today's standards - you'll be outdone by pretty much any 2008 desktop machine - but it'll be an interesting project anyway. Let us know how you get on.

Limited use

[idiot900]

Couple issues with this as an alternative to the garden-variety x86 cluster connected with InfiniBand:

Slow network interconnect. For problems that are not trivially parallel, network latency is usually a big deal. Ethernet doesn't cut it.
Lack of RAM. 'Nuff said.
Have to care about Cell and PS3 architecture. The codes ("codes" has a slightly different meaning in the context of supercomputing) have to be modified to take advantage of this very specific architecture. Software always outlives hardware, so in the long run the effort may not be worth it.

That said, it's really cheap. If your application isn't held back too much by these issues then enjoy your insanely cheap cluster!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Limited use

[thaig]

If you are writing code that only works on x86 then there's a problem straight away.

The code should also probably be written using some library that abstracts some of the details so it should be possible to change hardware at some point.

Then all that matters is whether or not the design of the machine fits the problem. PCs just might not do it.

Re:Limited use

[raftpeople]

This is why:
8 PS3's = 8 cells
8 cells X 7 available SPE's per cell = 56 SPE's
56 SPE's X 4 simultaneous FP calcs = 224 FP calcs per cycle

You would need to get quite a few of those x86 dual core kits to match that performance

Re:Limited use

[MikeBabcock]

I tell you what: you go ahead and buy $4000 of those Dual core kits, and we'll compare your output from a well-written algorithm versus the Cell system designed by this team.

Some interesting code examples for using the Cell have been demonstrated and it has immense processing power that most people don't recognize immediately. Check out this Dr Dobb's Journal article [uni-erlangen.de] for an example.

Re:Limited use

[Lord Grey]

The link to the actual Dr. Dobb's article [ddj.com] is way more readable.

Re:Limited use

[thaig]

Well there are 7 SPEs on a chip right? So the latency right there must be pretty low?

His problem probably *is* "trivially" parallel so perhaps he was right to do what he did?

Later he can "upgrade" to an IBM PowerXCell 8i based blade.

Imagine a beowulf cluster..

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

Re:Imagine a beowulf cluster..

[Arthur Grumbine]

Imagine the ratio of expense of "one" of these to a beowulf cluster of x86s created to provide equivalent computing power. Just imagine!! Hmmm...on second thought it's probably only like 1 to 2.5 or 3...

Might

[CopaceticOpus]

If this catches on for research institutions it may increase Sony's sales, but they might not be seeing the corresponding sale of games spike...

Why "might not"? Are you implying that people may be building PS3 clusters just so that they can sneak into the lab at night and have big gaming parties? Because I can totally see that.

a 2008 supercomputer is 100 teraflops

[peter303]

At any given time a supercomputer is one order of magnitude world fastest computers. This may have been a Year 2000 supercomputer, but far from one now.

Power and maintenance?

[lemaymd]

Researchers pay not only for the initial capital outlay required to install a supercomputer, but also for its power, cooling, the building it resides in, and its maintenance. This PS3 cluster might be cheap from the researchers' standpoint if they don't pay for any of these things directly, but I imagine their departments won't be real thrilled if a bunch of researchers start building their own individual "cheap" supercomputers! Those issues aside, it sounds like they're doing pretty cool stuff with those machines, so maybe more supercomputers should be cell-based!

Re:Power and maintenance?

[CronoCloud]

From what I gather with my limited geekery skills, the PS2 clusters worked the same way, a few x86 boxes to act as masters to keep the PS2's that did the grunt work with their VU's fed with data efficiently.

I wish I had one

[uassholes]

For the dick licks that say it's useless, I guess you missed all the previous articles about scientists who have been doing the same thing:

http://www.physorg.com/news92674403.html [physorg.com]

http://dgl.com/itinfo/2003/it030528.html [dgl.com]

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2006/Jul/06.html [lbl.gov]

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3 [stanford.edu]

What a ripoff!

[Anonymous Coward]

What a complete farce! Here I was all excited to go see this PS3 cluster "guide". From TFA:

"Found at www.ps3cluster.org, the resource fully illustrates how to create a fully functioning and high performance supercomputer with the Sony Playstation 3."

And what is actually *on* the site?? How to install Linux on a PS3 (as if there weren't any guides for that out there already). Then, they show the magical touch where they download the stock Fedora Open MPI implementation, and configure it using all *TWO THREADS* of the Power PC unit.

No mention that Open MPI doesn't even utilize the synergistic processors on the Cell. No benchmarks. Nada. They can boot Linux, and run a networked application that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the CELL architecture itself.

From the site: "One of the authors (Khanna) estimates that his MPI computations run much faster than on desktop workstation chipsets, and that his original 8 PS3 (i.e. 64 core) Cell cluster had comparable if not better performance to a 200 Node IBM Blue Gene system."

B.S. (And I am being generous.) Their MPI isn't using any 64 processors (when there are actually only 56 available cores for use on the PS3). His data sets may run about as fast as they would on 8 older Apple laptops, but there is no way they're anywhere near a Blue Gene. My tax dollars had better not have been used to fund this "research"....

Re:What a ripoff!

[enslaved_robot_boy]

If you clicked on some of the links you would find some quantitative data hotshot.

Games

[daybot]

If this catches on for research institutions it may increase Sony's sales, but they might not be seeing the corresponding sale of games spike

Come on - that's the whole point. This is what you'll need to run the PS3 version of Crysis!

diy distributed computing

[doronbc]

I've thought about Folding @Home and I've always wondered why can't there be a diy distributed computing server that could be setup. Something like this PS3 cluster but could be replicated with any home pc.

My setup for PS3Cluster

[J05H]

I helped Chris with the documentation, testing and image capture on this project. I see some "it doesn't do this!" comments above - please remember this is a young project that started out of one researcher's need to solve a specific type of problem. If you want to see this advance, it's all open source so start hacking.

So my setup:
1 40Gb Playstation3 w/ HDMI cable out and keyboard
Hauppauge HDPVR digitizer
PC running Windoze and Photoshop
TV hanging off the HDPVR for reference

Software as described on PS3Cluster.org including Geoff's Cell libraries, boot image on USB and Fedora 8 for PPC.

Plugged everything together, installed Fedora 6 the first time around since we knew that worked, then redid it with Fedora 8. Added the MPI libraries and ran the little Pi test code. Digitized the whole install as video, proofed out the process in terms of instructions. Did frame grabs from the video, cropped etc in Photoshop. Lots of work, totally worth it seeing the project posted here.

Oh, and it runs X - kinda cool having Firefox running on a game deck.

Enjoy,
Josh

Re:My setup for PS3Cluster

[CronoCloud]

Course it's cool having Firefox on a game console, though I had X and Firefox on my PS2 5 years ago, though it was Firefox was still Phoenix then. :-)

This is probably a silly question

[Chrisq]

This is probably a silly question but why/how are they running PPC Linux (which is presumably for the Power PC) on PS/3s which have cell processors?

I guess that either the PS3 has a PPC chip as well, or it runs some sort of emulation mode. I can't find either documented.

NAMD on CELL

[Pope Raymond Lama]

Since we are talking about this,does any one is using or have any newer news on the molecular simulator NAMD on the CELL Processor [uiuc.edu]? The official development stalled two years ago as its maintainer sinked into other projects, but I do actually help a team with a PS3 cluster which would be very interested in getting NAMD working under full load there.

Imagine...

[danieltdp]

...a beowulf cluster of that. Oh, wait!

IBM's version

[sanosuke001]

IBM BladeCenter QS22 [ibm.com]

If you want your cell system without the PS3's, get a couple of these. Each comes with two Cell 8i CPUs in a 1U case. Upgradeable dedicated processor memory slots and general use RAM slots. A bit more expensive than the PS3's, but might be easier to get the institutions to pay for...

Re:IBM's version

[sanosuke001]

A bit more info I found on the Cell Wikipedia Page

In 2008, IBM announced a revised variant of the Cell called the PowerXCell 8i, which is available in QS22 Blade Servers from IBM. The PowerXCell is manufactured on a 65 nm process, and adds support for up to 32GB of slotted DDR2 memory, as well as dramatically improving double-precision floating-point performance on the SPEs from a peak of about 14 GFLOPS to 102 GFLOPS total for 8 SPEs.

So, I configured 4 QS22's with 32GB RAM each and it came out to $42,144. This would be roughly 10x the price of your PS3 cluster with 8 systems. However, with the updated 8i architecture, you get more RAM as well as the higher performance.

8x PS3s = 112 GFLOPS
4x QS22s = 816 GFLOPS

7.28x the processing power for 10.5x the price. Seems reasonable to me. And if it really does cost them $5,000 per run on the NSF machine, 10 jobs pays for your system.

Re:Message from Government Man

[blhack]

Pay no attention to the man being arrested behind me for disclosing how to build a supercomputer using gaming consoles and beaten by the fine men and women of the LAPD

Please....please go back to reddit.

Re:Message from Government Man

[johanatan]

Or maybe he did catch it and thinks that sort of thing belongs on Reddit?

Re:Message from Government Man

[Anonymous Coward]

Luke: Your overconfidence is your weakness.

Emperor: Your faith in your moderators is yours!

Invader Zim is non-free

[tepples]

It's not my fault you didn't catch the Invader Zim reference.

Invader Zim is non-free. It's easier to catch pop culture references if they are pre-1923 or otherwise free [freedomdefined.org].

Re:Invader Zim is non-free 23-skidoo!

[hguorbray]

sorry, but that's stupid -how many pop culture references from 1923 are relevant to TODAY's pop culture:

seeya snookums, me and the squeeze are the bees knees in our raccoon coats, we're gonna get jazzed up in our hupmobile on hootch and go check out Mary Astor's horse after we hit the blind pig.

I agree its unfortunate that this stuff is non free, but pre 1923 means that most talkies would be out of bounds as well -including stuff you can see on tv all the time.

I'm just sayin'

Re:Invader Zim is non-free 23-skidoo!

[mollymoo]

sorry, but that's stupid -how many pop culture references from 1923 are relevant to TODAY's pop culture:

A perfect illustration of the fact that copyright terms are way too long.

Re:Invader Zim is non-free 23-skidoo!

[hguorbray]

That's not the point -relevant pop culture deals with stuff happening NOW.

'I like ike' and 'tippecanoe and tyler too' were relevant in their time -not now.

Now its about bling, blogs and obama

if you limit yourself to 50 year old culture references you are missing leet-geek-speak, hiphop/drug culture, simpsons (which is mostly culture references itself) and anything else that has been in the public consciousness for the past 40 years

not that missing some of the above would necessarily be a bad thing...but that's current pop culture.

I'm just sayin'

"I like Ike"

[tepples]

'I like ike' and 'tippecanoe and tyler too' were relevant in their time -not now.

I wouldn't say they're exactly irrelevant. If you know about "I like Ike", you'll better appreciate the cheer for one of the characters in Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Brawl: "We like Ike! We like Ike!"

if you limit yourself to 50 year old culture references you are missing leet-geek-speak

Not necessarily. Geekspeak is more likely to be under a license for free cultural works.

Re:Invader Zim is non-free 23-skidoo!

[meringuoid]

sorry, but that's stupid -how many pop culture references from 1923 are relevant to TODAY's pop culture

More than you'd think. In 1923, Edgar Rice Burroughs published Tarzan and the Golden Lion, A. A. Milne published The House at Pooh Corner, Felix Salten published Bambi, A Life in the Woods, and P. G. Wodehouse published The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith. Pretty much everyone recorded one version or another of Yes, We Have No Bananas, and the year also saw the Charleston dance craze. Charlie Chaplin ate his shoe in The Gold Rush. And to the delight of brewers and distillers everywhere, Brendan Behan was born.

1923-skidoo

[tepples]

sorry, but that's stupid -how many pop culture references from 1923 are relevant to TODAY's pop culture:

Anglophone popular culture is full of allusions to plays written four centuries ago by William Shakespeare. You also find allusions to Twain, Dickens, and other nineteenth-century authors.

but pre 1923 means that most talkies would be out of bounds as well

At least with classic literature, you can quote more of the context to clarify your reference without any risk of crossing the line from fair use to copyvio. Otherwise, if you often allude to works that are still copyrighted, you have to accept the excuse "I don't own a copy of that work."

Re:"super" computer:

[steveha]

I'm not trying to be a smartass, but why did he mention in TFA that his supercomputer cost $4000 if the 8 consoles were "Sony-donated"?

Oh come on, you are being pedantic. Clearly what he meant was "$4000 worth of consoles", never mind that they were donated. $X worth of consoles is a useful number if someone is considering buying PS3s and setting up a supercomputer; it's also a fun number to compare to the cost of renting time on some large supercomputer.

The original Wired article is informative:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer [wired.com]

He asked for Sony to donate the PS3s because he didn't think the NSF would give him grant money to buy video game systems. Now that he has actually built the supercomputer and it does everything he hoped it would do, perhaps other researchers will be able to justify the money to set up their own clusters (without donations from Sony).

The numbers are a no-brainer: he used to spend $5000 to do a single simulation run using rented supercomputer time. For less than the cost of a single simulation run, you can set up your own supercomputer and make simulation runs whenever you feel like it.

ALso, like the iPod example at the top of the post, most research use of the technology won't come from actual iPods or consoles

Um, he is using actual PS3 consoles to do actual research.

If one wanted to build their own home "super" computer then why not just use CUDA and a few Nvidia cards?

If you think that is a good way to make a super computer, why don't you go ahead and do it, and make a web site explaining how it is done?

Meanwhile, he thought he had a good way to go with the PS3, and it did in fact work as he expected, so what's the problem?

Anyway, here's why he thought it was a good idea. From the above linked Wired article:

According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he's not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. "It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time," Rimon says.

Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.

steveha

Economy of Scale

[inKubus]

Yep, this is a classic example of economies of scale. There are several other versions of the Cell processor out there, many of them designed for high-performance computing (HPC). But they range from 400-3000 bucks a pop. With the PS3, they have basically forced out a much more expensive chip more cheaply because they are delivering so many. And of course they can make up the difference in games.

Re:"super" computer:

[TrancePhreak]

The Cell in the PS3 has 7 cores, 1 is reserved for the hypervisor. You get 6 cores.

Re:"super" computer:

[ozphx]

So by "sony-donated" its "sony-still-pushing-teh-cell-is-teh-awesomes" bandwagon?

The "real" cell chip is used in "real" supercomputers - not the stripped down one with only 7 SPUs in the PS3. We're talking like 32 of the babys.

Thats how you make an efficient supercomputer - not by wiring together a bunch of toys (even if they do run *nix).

Re:"super" computer:

[afidel]

Old CPU's have a much lower MIPS/Watt and a lower MIPS/interconnect so they have a higher cost. Many organizations have found it's cheaper to retire an old supercomputer and add a few nodes to the new one even if it is more capital outlay to get the same performance. Basically a Cell does many times as much useful work than a P4 at a fraction of the power budget.

Re:"super" computer:

[eltaco]

see afidel's posting.
basically it comes down to the costs of having your own personal power station in the TCO to run a cluster.
this started (well, really hit it off) a few years back, when the pentium M and centrino tech became widespread. basically, to my knowledge, it was the first time you could actually have more processors with less jiggahertz, that consumed less power in total and still had more flops than the others. it swayed everyone from "more powerful cpus plz" train of thought to the "more cpus, less power-consumption". (also cpus/chips in general will eventually hit an upper barrier, making parallel computing a necessity)
I haven't checked the facts on the ps3, but seeing how much nether-region sucking is going on, ps3s probably fit into this scheme.

Re:"super" computer:

[lysergic.acid]

it's not that simple. sure you can make up for a lack of per-CPU processing power through cluster computing, but at some point it becomes more practical or even cheaper to go with a smaller cluster using a better processor architecture.

you could use hundreds of P3s or even P4s and still not achieve the same real-world performance as a couple dozen cell processors or modern GPGPU stream processors. that's because P3s & P4s are general-purpose CPUs designed for SISD/scalar processing. they're great for the bulk of general-purpose commodity computing applications like running an OS, web browser, word processor, etc., but high-performance computing problems typically involve processing very large data sets that greatly benefit from data parallelism. so if you had two processors, one scalar and one vector, each with the same power consumption and clock rate, the vector processor would be an order of magnitude faster at performing HPC tasks than the processor with the scalar architecture.

and the combined use of parallelization at multiple levels will always be more efficient than relying solely on a single form of parallelism. blindly adding more cheap 32-bit scalar CPUs won't get you as good of results as building a smaller cluster comprised of 64-bit fully-pipelined stream processors with multithreaded superscalar cores that support VLIW. in the former case, you're only employing task-level parallelism, whereas in the later case you're taking advantage of bit-level, instruction-level (pipelining + superscalar + VLIW), data, and task-level (multiprocessing + multithreading) parallelism. you'd not only save power by using fewer (more power-efficient) processors, but you'd also reduce memory coherence & bandwidth problems, not to mention the space savings.

Re:"super" computer:

[J05H]

Answer: PS3s were used because of the vector processors - they are significantly faster than general purpose CPUs for some of Dr. Khanna's needs and the general vision of the project. These are chips designed for raytracing which makes them perfect for some forms of scientific processing.

Also a rack unit full of PS3s looks way cooler than some crufty old PCs pulled from a dumpster.

Josh - PS3Cluster tester

Re:"super" computer:

[tolan-b]

Seems to me that you'd be better off waiting for Cell on a PCI card type solutions like the SpursEngine from Leadtek that's quoted as launching at around $285. There's plenty of the PS3 going to waste if you're just using the Cell for processing and ignoring the GPU, BluRay drive and so on.

Re:"super" computer:

[Chrisq]

or bank reclaimed assets from a sunken business?

What type of processor do Woolworth's POS tills use?

Re:"super" computer:

[TheKidWho]

Not true. The Tesla C1060 is about the same as a Geforce GTX 280 in raw processing power and # of stream processors.

Re:"super" computer:

[TheKidWho]

It's the planned project for the summer. Putting together a GPU based SuperComputer with ~3-4TFlops of Performance for under $6,000. I plan on running CFD code on it.

Re:Pretty much useless

[blind biker]

How is it useless, when the guy who built it, used it already for a month? And it has replaced 200 supercomputer nodes, for his purpose? I'd say that's very fucking useful.

But you know what, maybe you should send him an e-mail and try to convince him how his cluster is useless. Make it a nice, insightful and intelligent e-mail, like your post.

Pretty much useless for most tasks

[melted]

Granted, there are problems which don't require much RAM per core. However, I run my stuff on a 500+ core cluster nightly and boxes there have 16GB of RAM. We're thinking of upgrading to 32GB, actually, to be able to work with larger data sets. 50MB per core is utterly inadequate for 95% of problems out there, and 100mbps interconnect is inadequate for the remaining 4.5%. If this dude falls into 0.5% for whom this could actually be useful, he can pat himself on the back I guess.

Sony owns a movie studio

[tepples]

Most of my friends purchased a ps3 because it's the cheapest profile 2(is that what it's called?) blueray player on the market, they have 1-2 movies each, and just use it as a showcase, sony will never make cash out of them....

Sony owns a movie studio. And as I understand it, Sony also owns a significant share of the patent and trade secret rights in Blu-ray Disc. But if by "Sony" you mean the PlayStation division called "Sony Computer Entertainment", you may be right.

Re:Why doesn't Sony make it ?

[Malekin]

I betcha there's enough talent out there to make a small desktop unit. An affordable, out of box, mass produced Sony supercomputer./p>

I think Sony feels that's exactly what the PS3 is.

Re:Why doesn't Sony make it ?

[CronoCloud]

Well, you can use a PS3 as a desktop, I do it myself, like I did the PS2 before it. But is this more of the kind of thing you're thinking about:

http://pro.sony.com/bbsccms/ext/ZEGO/ZEGO.shtml [sony.com]

It's a rackmount server though.

Re:Why doesn't Sony make it ?

[Sarusa]

Well the funny thing is they're still losing money on every PS3 sold. At least from the last cost analysis I saw, which was back in July. They are counting on you watching Blu-Ray disks or buying games, and any PS3 in a computing scenario won't be doing any of that (barring someone 'misallocating resources' *koff koff*).

So your idea makes sense. They are partnered with Toshiba to produce the low(er) cost Cell add-ons outside of a PS3. And you should see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28microprocessor%29#Possible_applications for some others.

The sad thing is that a Cell is far more suited for supercomputing than it is for writing games on, but Sony seems insistent that the primary purpose is making game devs's lives miserable while IBM and Toshiba seem more focused on using it where it's actually useful.

Re:AFRL did it already

[J05H]

Cool - but is it open source?