From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Mon May 26 2003 - 00:54:24 MDT
full ariticle at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/26/technology/26XSUPE.html
From PlayStation to Supercomputer for $50,000
By JOHN MARKOFF
<<As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the computing power of
sophisticated but inexpensive video-game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a
supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2's.
The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a
little more than $50,000. The center's researchers believe the system may be
capable of a half trillion operations a second, well within the definition of
supercomputer, although it may not rank among the world's 500 fastest
supercomputers.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open source
Linux operating system, is that the only hardware engineering involved was
placing 70 of the individual game machines in a rack and plugging them together
with a high-speed HP network switch. The center's scientists bought 100
machines, but are holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display
application.
"It took a lot of time because you have to cut all of these things out of the
plastic packaging," said Craig Steffen, a senior research scientist at the
center, who is one of four scientists working part time on the project.
The scientists are taking advantage of a standard component of the Sony
video-game console that was originally intended to move and transform pixels
rapidly on a television screen to produce lifelike graphics. The chip is not the
PlayStation 2's MIPS microprocessor, but rather a graphics co-processor known as
the Emotion Engine. That custom designed silicon chip is capable of producing
up to 6.5 billion mathematical operations a second.
The impressive performance of the game machine, which has been on the market
for a few years, underscores a radical shift that has taken place in the
computing world since the end of the cold war in the late 1980's, according to the
researchers.
While the most advanced computing technologies have historically been
developed first for large corporate users and military contractors, increasingly the
fastest computers are being developed for the consumer market and for products
meant to be placed under Christmas trees.
"If you look at the economics of game platforms and the power of computing on
toys, this is a long-term market trend and computing trend," said Dan Reed,
the supercomputing center's director. "The economics are just amazing. This is
going to drive the next big wave in high-performance computing.">>>
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