Cell BE and PS3 bookmarks

Whatever …
recently I spent my time learning parallel computing, clusters, grids and so on.
I found very interesting latest news about PS3‘s clusters, so I decide to spend more time and have deeper look.

PS3′s heart is cpu CELL Broadband Engine, or simply Cell.

I won’t talk about Cell‘s logic, the PPE unit, 8 SPUs (SIMD processors), 204.8 Gflop/s theorical peak performance or EIB bus (that moves 96 bytes every single cycle!).

Well, this little toy is the engine inside PS3 and someone had the right idea to “play” with it to build up a sort of cluster.

Unfortunately main goal of PS3 is not number cranching, massive calculation otherwise we’ll see serverfarms full of PS3.
That would be lots of money, STI’s dream (Sony-Toshiba-Ibm) would come true.
But (there is always a but!) PS3 is powerfull enough to solve small problems, without spending lots of money.

Examples:
-PS3 Gravity Grid
-IBM ray tracing and youtube video (plus a pdf here)
-Folding@home

Impressive, isn’t it?

If you want look inside the box, here are some docs about Cell cpu:
-2007_ieeecomputer.pdf
-Cell Programmin Handbook
-IBM Cell resource center
-CellPerformance
-IBM Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem
-SCOP3, A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the PlayStation 3
- Build an 8 PS3 supercomputer

As you’ve seen above, this is not rocket science but it may help you to walk your way easily enough.

Technorati tags: Cell BE, PS3, Grid Computing, Parallel Computing, Distributed Computing

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