[aduug] Fwd: [news] Sony playstations combined to make a supercomputer

[Mark Prior]

I mentioned this at lunch yesterday.

Mark.

>Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 11:21:18 -0400 (EDT)
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>Subject: [news] Sony playstations combined to make a supercomputer
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>[Some excerpts from NY Times article - BSA
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/26/technology/26XSUPE.html?th
>
>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
>Hewlett-
>Packard network switch. The center's scientists bought 100 machines, but are
>holding 30
>in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display application.
>
>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.
>
>But they noted that the computer was already running useful calculations on
>quantum
>chromodynamics, or QCD, simulations. QCD is a theory concerning the so-called
>strong
>interactions that bind elementary particles like quarks and gluons together to
>form
>hadrons, the constituents of nuclear matter.
>
>
>
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