Hi Guys and Girls.

I was just wondering what the general consensus is about using the new Playstation 3\'s as a crunching machine for CPDN.

I know that on some other projects there is discusion about floating point accuracy, but the speed is truly awesome.

True it\'ll have to run on lunix but thats OK too.

Any ideas...
Peter

Not sure...
CPDN (and other BOINC projects) will utilize one powerfull CPU...when more cores are on the chip, it needs to run more models (Wus) concurently (with higher memory and HD usage).

As there are milions of PS3 consoles to be sold during 2006, it would be nice to have some of them stretching on BOINC while they are idle next to TV.

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actualy i think its an intresting concept.

I dont know that much about the game systems and there capabilities but im i would love to see them be able to be used for Distributed computing. (might actualy be able to convince me to buy one)

as for it running CPDN.. wow talk about useing the system hard. honestly with the past few rollouts of new game systems and overheating proplems and such I wonder how they would handle something that takes months to run

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I am unsure that the FPU on those are powerful enough to do this. They are graphic intensive, and might have a good processor, but how much floating point math does these systems really need to do? How accruate does it need to be? I mean if one pixel is off color a little, most people won\'t notice that. These projects want accuracy with floating point math, and unsure that the game systems would be able to do the work with enough accuracy to make it worth doing. Same thing with handhelds.

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I am unsure that the FPU on those are powerful enough to do this. They are graphic intensive, and might have a good processor, but how much floating point math does these systems really need to do? How accruate does it need to be? I mean if one pixel is off color a little, most people won\'t notice that. These projects want accuracy with floating point math, and unsure that the game systems would be able to do the work with enough accuracy to make it worth doing. Same thing with handhelds.

Good points.

My memory (increasingly faulty with advanced age) says they use RISC instruction sets. Been a while since I read-up in that technology and it\'s probably evolved -- but it seems a problem, when we want to see SSE2/3...

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.

The first (current) iteration of the Cell Core apparently does not even have full FPU support, its performance is supposedly only very high (> 40GFlops peak) with Integer or Half Precision math. With full precision, it is said to drop below 9GFlops (peak).

The next generation is supposed to change that, but the current design isn\'t such a big number-cruncher as the initial presentations made it look like.
(and there\'s still the problem of optimizing the Code to actually use its ALU\'s to maximum extend, significantly reducing performance even further)

Technically, I wouldn\'t hold my breath for the results of the current Cell CPU in terms of numbercrunching.

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