Pictured: The U.S. Air Force's PS3 Cluster Set-up

[gmcboot]

[citation][nom]joebob2000[/nom]The cell isn't that advanced? What a shame, better tell six of the top500 list members, including the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, that the cell chips in their computers are 'marketing hype'. Never mind the benchmarks, they bought a glorified game console! You said so, and you have to be right![/citation]

I am so glad that you recognize that I am right. AGAIN, other than running the FLOPS test, show me the real world application other than the PS3 and being used as a subsystem video process, what the CELL is doing. It's not. It not in any servers that 99.9999 percent of the business or scientific market is using. If it were such a great chip, then it would be used in so many other circumstances AND Sony would not have lost so much money over the past 3 years.

Use a little logic instead of all this fanboy worship. Stop reading blog post, 3 year old Sony Marketing Material and look at real world applications.

As for this application, the amount of money they are spending on this is a drop.. no it is a MICRODROP in the military budget of this country. This is basically someone who is running some kind of test to see if they can use an existing form factor (the PS3) to get some kind of real world solution. It may work, but if anyone believes this couldn't be done by Intel, Nvidia, AMD and ATI (or Sun or IBM) then put down your game magazine and go back to school.

The CELL is not the most advance piece of silicon on the planet. If it was Sony would be selling billions of them. Hell the best Intel has to offer right now is 1200 bucks in lots of 1000. You mean to tell me that Sony couldn't cell the CELL at half that price (still more than the PS3 as a total package) and make a killing?!?!

You can love the PS3, but be smart enough to see the Marketing hype for what it is.

 

[Guest]

i you are all so smart join the airforce and show them the errors of their ways

sorry go back to building your girl robots, drinking mountain dew, and playing wow now

 

[doomtomb]

I don't see the point of this...

 

[Impulse Fire911]

Ps3 Cluster: "Jerry Shaw, please step forward to the screen and plant your left hand on the monitor, operation guillotine is now in effect"

A guy named Mike: "wait, what the fuck?"

 

[Hanin33]

this is pure marketing for a few reasons:

cell servers in blade configurations were out before the ps3 made it to market and the army was using them for incoming missile track processing in Humvees... to say that the ps3 is cheaper is to not understand the logistics of managing a cluster larger than a few dozen units...

the cell processor in the PS3 is crippled compared to the processors used in some of the top supercomputers and those found in blade servers.

the US military is doing everything they can to recruit new young meatbags that are of the nintendo generation... things like this are only honey in the trap...

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]Honis[/nom]No it wouldn't. PS3 = 1.7 Teraflops GPU. 2 Teraflops Floating Point.[/citation]

2 trillion FLoating point Operations Per Second Floating Point? Am I missing something? I think I know what you're saying.

Anyway, he makes a good point, X86 CPUs have very low throughput compared to CPUs like the Cell Processor...

 

[FloKid]

Anyone know what hardware the PS4 will feature? I am surprised how well the PS3 performs with 256MB of video memory. The cell processor is amazing. Sony has to make a game though for that cluster. Gotta see what it can do. Why would they use it for anyother reason, since supercomputers are way faster that even 3K PS3s together. Dunno I guess there might be some other reason. Maybe the military just wants to see if terrorists can use it for some psychotic reason. I take my hat off for the soldiers, they are very smart and brave.

 

[fkr1]

the beauty of these cell processors is that the programming is the defining characteristic of there power. the cell processor itself is fairly simple. almost all of the control logic is removed from the cell processor and is added by the program. registering etc. explained: The first phase is characterized by static execution, where instructions are issued to the execution units in the exact order in which they're fed into the processor. With dual-issue machines like the original Pentium, two instructions that meet certain criteria can execute in parallel, and it takes a minimal amount of logic to implement this very simple form of out-of-order execution.
In the second phase, computer designers included an instruction window, increased the number of execution units in the execution core, and increased the cache size. So more code and data would fit into the caching subsystem (either L1 or L1 + L2), and the code would flow into the instruction window where it would be spread out and rescheduled to execute in parallel on a large number of execution units.
The third phase is characterized by a massive increase in the sizes of the caches and the instruction window, with some modest increases in execution core width. In this third phase, memory is much farther away from the execution core, so more cache is needed to keep performance from suffering. Also, the execution core has been widened slightly and its units have been more deeply pipelined, with the result that there are more execution slots per cycle to fill.

this is why programmers dislike the ps3, it is difficult to write code for. but i agree that the gov't had to like the upside of saying come play with ps3's

 

[michaelahess]

Um, crappiest rack's ever winner? WTF? They decide to go dirt cheap on the whole thing?

 

[climber]

[citation][nom]Toddosan[/nom]ok, but will it blend?[/citation]

On that note, will it frappé? We do know that we measure performance in FRAPS!

 

[deuketc]

it would be good to know the failure rate of the 2200 sample

 

[socrates047]

the wierd thing is that doesn't the USA have huge money allocated towards the military, so why are they so thrifty?

 

[Guest]

lmaol!! wait isnt crysis coming for the ps3 aswell as 360? with crytek saying they are shocked at the fact the console version rivals its pc brother..and yes it can play mario not halo and i think evry other nintendo/sega/game.with the right hack.hmmm im kinda shocked i can say it doesnt play playstation games..wait if it did everything wouldnt it play ps1/ps2 games? oh well i love it and it put a smile on my face ..lol see it only does everything

 

[techguy911]

[citation][nom]djsample[/nom]The cell processor is a shame especially considering that the ones in the PS3 actually have an SPE disabled and another locked out for special functions and security. The PPE in the CELL processor is more akin a conventional CPu although for out of order code it will fall flat compared to even a low range CPU. The CELL processor was designed for specially written code with small to no branch predicting. Sure it has a large theoretical perfomance figure but thats only for in order code doign the same thingover and over again, Give it anything complex and it'll stumble and fall, The SPE's like someone quoted are merely like pixel shaders, they dont do much, the PPE takes the brunt work and passes it on to the SPE's. So 336 ps3 render farm = fail.[/citation]

You really need to do your homework and read i have a ps3 and have seen first hand the computing power it has.

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers
Most of this work has been done using ps3's

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3

The ps3 provides more computing power for the buck then any other solution.

I have a quad core running folding@home it is nowhere near as fast as ps3.

Besides medical the ps3 would also do very well in physics and astronomy anything with large amounts of number crunching.

The ps3 cluster used on the internet for folding@home has broken records for amounts of information processed.

 

[bayouboy]

[citation][nom]techguy911[/nom]The ps3 provides more computing power for the buck then any other solution.
[/citation]

No it doesn't, don't make stuff up. The ATI Radeon R800 offers the best bang for the buck. Around $0.13 per GFLOPS where as the cell processor inside the PS3 is $1.50 per GFLOPS.

The only problem I see with the R800 is ATI's proprietary software.

Think if you could use folding@home with a HD5870, it would smoke your PS3.

 

[jisamaniac]

300 PS3! THIS IS SPARTA!

 

[djsample]

lol at the pS3 fan boys. The CELL processor in the ps3 isnt a fully working unit. and making comparisons to your home computer and the ps3 using folding@home = fail.
there is a special version made to make full use of the PS3, try getting a version to make full use of your computer and is subsytems then get back to us. The PS3 uses what is now old tech and toshiba and ibm have pulled CELL from their line up, only sony keeps pedalling them in the PS3.

 

[demonhorde665]

[citation][nom]TripGun[/nom]I fail to see the practicality of this setup. True, the cell processor can move large amounts data, but I don't see it having the effectiveness of what a render farm could deliver. This seems to me as being a media recruiting machine, "come join us,look how cool we are".[/citation]


likely they re jsut Testing how this runs thier radar imaging to determine if it is more cost efficent than a render farm. no oen ever siad this would be more powerful than a render farm , and any one that thinks it would is a f---ing moron. the military i'm sure is just testing this as possible way to do the job cheaper, since render farms are NOT cheap especialy when you are talking 1000+ machines. i bet sony is loving this hype

 

[techguy911]

[citation][nom]bayouboy[/nom]No it doesn't, don't make stuff up. The ATI Radeon R800 offers the best bang for the buck. Around $0.13 per GFLOPS where as the cell processor inside the PS3 is $1.50 per GFLOPS.The only problem I see with the R800 is ATI's proprietary software.Think if you could use folding@home with a HD5870, it would smoke your PS3.[/citation]
You fail at math an hd5870 needs a computer to run thus those are gpu's a ps3 is a full computer a video card cannot run apps by itself.

 

[nottheking]

I'll admit I have SOME concerns over their choice of design there... I could see using the CBE; it fits in interesting niche between flexible, high-instruction, super-scalar, general-purpose CPUs like modern Intel Cores and AMD Phenoms, and rigid, high-math, vector, special-purpose chips, like, say, AMD's Cypress or nVidia's upcoming Fermi. The former group can handle tons of complex, varied instructions, while the latter is unrivaled in floating-point power.

However, by now, the CBE, originally designed for a 90nm process, is pretty dated; technology moves FAST; while its ~185.6 gigaflops of theoretical peak power was pretty high in 2006, general-purpose CPUs are rapidly catching up; most quad-cores pass 50 gigaflops without having a hard limit of ~3.2 MIPS. And of course, on the GPGPU front, an AMD Crypress can pass 2,700 gigaflops.

Rather, I guess my concern is with cost; a single PS3 is running them $300US... While a bank of CBE-based blade servers would've made tons of sense for hitting that middle-ground, (even in spite of technology's advancement, the CBE does remain useful for lack of a proper 65nm or 45nm successor) I think that possibly the cost of the whole PS3 would weigh it down... Not by a whole lot, perhaps, but it might be less cost-efficient (as well as heat-efficient) than a more application-specific alternative.