[Titanio]

Not really a technical article, but one of those "what other people are doing with Cell/PS3" stories..

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news..._supercomputer

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.

Not to encourage a slew of 'begging letters' to Sony, but this guy managed to bag his PS3s for free from Sony, after demonstrating the performance he achieved with one PS3 and suitably impressing them.

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.

"Basically, it's almost like a replacement," he says. "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing."

It's kind of interesting that most of the 'homebrew' interest in PS3 doesn't seem to be so much 'homebrew' as 'researchbrew'.

edit - more info here: http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html

He reckons the performance per dollar available to them on PS3 is better than anything else out there - and this is double-precision work too. The '200 node supercomputer' referenced earlier in the comparison would appear to be 200 Blue Gene nodes - and he thinks there's a good bit of headroom for further optimisation.

[Nesh]

How come nobody posted in here?

[SPM]

16 PS3 supercomputing cluster is used to model gravity waves resulting from collision of black holes.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/02...ng_blackholes/
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html

The 16 PS3s haven't been physically modified. They're networked together using an inexpensive Gigabit Ethernet switch.

"Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer," Khanna noted.

New Scientist article on use of PS3 clusters for supercomputing, Wii consoles for medical applications, and GPUs for molecular research
http://media.newscientist.com/data/p...643/264326.pdf

[Tammy]

I read the article in wired.com as well.
I love improvisation - It is just so creative. who would have thought (certainly not the developers of PS3) that it could be used for important research instead of games...
as they say - necessity is the mother of all invention!