Your next supercomputer--PlayStation 2?
According to the New York Times, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois assembled the $50,000 machine out of components bought in retail shops. In all, 100 PlayStation 2 consoles were bought but only 70 have been used for this project.
These units are mounted on racks and are networked with two Hewlett-Packard 2650 Procurve switches, NCSA said on its Web site. NCSA said in the report their system could theoretically deliver half a trillion operations per second, which equals 0.5 teraflops of computing power.
If it performs as promised, the machine will rank among the world’s top 500 supercomputers.
At present, NEC’s Earth Simulator is the world’s most powerful machine. It is 80 times faster than NCSA’s PlayStation-based system with over 5,200 processors and 40 teraflops of computing power.
NCSA’s supercomputer runs on the Linux operating system which is included as part of a Sony Linux kit for the PlayStation 2.
"This distribution uses Linux 2.2.1 ported to the PlayStation's Emotion Engine CPU (Central Processing Unit), and is based on an earlier version of Red Hat Linux for PCs," said NCSA. "The distribution includes development tools that you would expect--libraries, editors, compilers and debuggers that you'd find in any Linux distribution."
The console's Emotion Engine graphics processor, capable of producing up to 6.5 billion mathematical operations a second, is the force behind the cluster's power, the report said.
The team is said to be using this project as a test bed to see how they can use lower-cost, off-the-shelf technologies to aid their studies. The PlayStation supercomputer is already running physics calculations.
This distributed computing effort using the PlayStation is not unique to NCSA. Sony is also singing a similar tune with ongoing tests using groups of Linux-powered PS2s hooked up in grids to boost processing speed.
A Sony spokesman previously said the firm is working with IBM to apply Big Blue's research in "grid computing," a variation of distributed computing, to the next PlayStation.