Hmmm....8 interlinked PS3's = one supercomputer

Is it just me, or don't you think Sony just made it easier for evil geniuses to rule the world now?

Anyways I guess this can be great news for those scientists...one day solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole swallows up a star, the next day 8 different Blue-Ray movies playing at once! or something like that...

Multiple PS3 systems is probably fairly cost effective, but I wonder why he didn't go with a more conventional approach ...

If he shared resoruces with other researchers he could have potentially gotten multiple blade servers, each with two dual core (or quad core) xeon processors which would have had more processing power and a far more 'standard' design ...

@happy squrrel

I dont know either.. maybe because the cell is alot more powerful than 2 Xeon processors.

Ignoring the fact that 2 GB of RAM and 8 cells do not make a real supercomputer, this is pretty cool. Sony gets publicity out of this, for a small price (per unit loss in hardware times 8 in this case).

Regarding evil geniuses, it reminds me of this (regarding not the PS3, but the PS2):

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/19/iraq_buys_4000_playstation_2s/

 Besides the PS3 you can only get the Cell in IBM Blade servers at this point in time.  Your talking at least $5-10K.  Unless you know of another place I can get a Cell workstation. ;)

If the Cell was more powerful that 2 Xeon processors why are companies willing to spend multiple times the price of a PS3 to buy a Xeon processor to run linux?

My question was that the cost for a researcher shouldn't be that major of a concern being that he could have (probably) found several researchers who were looking for a very powerful system, and he could have leased the hardware at a fraction of the cost of buying it.

most companies buy blade servers... not just regular server computers. And some blade servers are pwoered by the CELL.

Saw a couple of posters on using PS3 for seismic processing at SEG this year. It really seems to be that the PS3 provides you a really great amount of processing power for certain types of problems for a really low price. The problems have to be able to be solved in different memory constraints than those of your usual workstation situation but if you can re-code your software within those constraints and your problem is a candidate for parallelization in the first place then it is a great deal.

Why are people willing to buy a Blade server with a Cell CPU for many times the cost of a PS3?  The answer is of course flexibility, you can load up a Blade server with several GB of RAM and dual Cells.  Still, if your work doesn't require loads of memory but does require loads of horsepower, a PS3 cluster is extremely cost effective.  The PS3 that I wrote my matrix multiply on for school was in a cluster of 24 PS3s at Virginia Tech's corporate research lab.  They're researching cost-effective supercomputing from both a price-of-hardware perspective and a cost-to-operate perspective (lowering the power bill).  It's a pretty good deal, since Sony sells these things at a loss, whereas IBM sells them at huge profit margins.

Also, they just dropped the price. I don't think anyone interested in the Cell is going to feel like paying 100 dollars extra for the EE and GS. Those 8 PS3s might've cost only about 3200 bucks, with the recent cuts.