The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
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Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#2When reading through this I was sure this was about Folding@Home but turns out this was a different project! Strange that Folding@Home isn't even mentioned, if I recall it correctly, you could install Folding@Home easily via the store on the PS3, and a normal user could contribute. The Verge article seems more focused on customized machine (rooted to run Linux and stored at location) instead of using the standard OS and letting the contributors have the machine at home. Folding@Home seems to still be running to this day as well! Plenty of information about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home#PlayStation_3
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#3> the PS4 can’t easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. “There’s nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, it’s just a regular old PC,” Khanna says. “We weren’t really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.”
The article doesn’t really explain in detail the difference that made the ps3 an attractive buy for making super computers over regular PCs. Can someone elaborate?
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#4> the PS4 can’t easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. “There’s nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, it’s just a regular old PC,” Khanna says. “We weren’t really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.” The article doesn’t really explain in detail the difference that made the ps3 an attractive buy for making super computers over regular PCs. Can someone elaborate?
From Wikipedia about another, similar project (Folding@Home)
> At the time of its inception, its main streaming Cell processor delivered a 20 times speed increase over PCs for some calculations, processing power which could not be found on other systems such as the Xbox 360.[36][190] The PS3's high speed and efficiency introduced other opportunities for worthwhile optimizations according to Amdahl's law
> The PS3's uniform console environment made technical support easier and made Folding@home more user friendly.[36] The PS3 also had the ability to stream data quickly to its GPU, which was used for real-time atomic-level visualizing of the current protein dynamics
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#5I would expect this to be more viable than ever, now that the cost of console hardware is so heavily subsidised by online subscription services.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#6> the PS4 can’t easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. “There’s nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, it’s just a regular old PC,” Khanna says. “We weren’t really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.” The article doesn’t really explain in detail the difference that made the ps3 an attractive buy for making super computers over regular PCs. Can someone elaborate?
Massive vector compute units.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#7> the PS4 can’t easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. “There’s nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, it’s just a regular old PC,” Khanna says. “We weren’t really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.” The article doesn’t really explain in detail the difference that made the ps3 an attractive buy for making super computers over regular PCs. Can someone elaborate?
As I recall, a big part of it was that Sony was subsidizing the powerful hardware, selling it slightly below market under the business model of making the money back by selling games to run on the systems (kind of like the printer/ink model)
This meant you could buy much more hardware for the same cost verse buying the parts individually.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#8This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux).
Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those without access to supercomputers are the ones to suffer from this decision.
Sony had to appeal to their gaming community over the science community so that's that.
Also it's 'OtherOS' not 'OpenOS'.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#9> "The Air Force had to convince Sony to..."
To be a fly on the wall during that discussion. I'm sure money wasn't an issue for the Air Force, or that Sony had some balls of steel.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#10It would be awesome if you could install Linux on modern Xbox or PS4 consoles and use them as PCs...