When it comes to high-performance computing, Sony's PlayStation 3 is not all fun and games. Four years after Sony unveiled its gaming console to the world, some researchers and federal agencies are using PS3s for serious work. For the last year, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., has used a bank of 40 interconnected PS3 consoles to decrypt passwords. It's working to add 40 more units. Through Stanford University's Folding@home project, almost 40,000 PS3s volunteered by their owners during idle time currently contribute to the study of protein folding. More than 880,000 PS3 consoles have participated in the project, researchers said. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., uses a cluster of 336 PS3s for research on urban surveillance and large image processing. Last month, the lab ordered 2,200 more units. Since the PS3's unveiling in 2005, the console has been touted not only for its amped-up gaming capabilities but also for its ability to generate complex real-time graphics and calculations thanks to its ground-breaking Cell processor, created by IBM in collaboration with Sony and Toshiba. What particularly caught the attention of researchers was the PS3's ability to have the Linux operating system installed on it - which allows the gaming console to be transformed into a powerful home computer. That opened the door for researchers to use the PS3's power for projects and experiments that required high-performance computing.
The Cell processor, researchers said, is perfect for applications that need a heavy amount of number-crunching and can vastly outperform traditional CPUs. The processor, for example, can do 100 billion operations per second while a typical CPU can only run 5 billion. The PlayStation 3's Cell processor allows video games to simulate physical reality. You can have a character with clothing and the clothing will flap in the wind. It turned out that with a certain amount of work, it was possible to run scientific applications in the processor. The real performance edge of the PS3 shows off when the computing power of several consoles is joined together. While early experiments tried clustering several consoles, Stanford's Folding@home project was among the first to try something more ambitious. Since 1999, FAH has studied the way proteins fold and misfold in an effort to better understand diseases like Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's. Because running simulations requires staggering amounts of computing power, the FAH team appeals to computer owners across the globe to help by leaving their computers on to perform calculations and simulations when they're not using them. The combined computing power coming from the network of volunteers was modest until FAH and Sony developed an application that would allow PS3 owners to contribute their idle consoles to the project.
More information:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/04/BU731AV5TM.DTL
More information:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/04/BU731AV5TM.DTL