 | Astrophysics Lab Replaces Supercomputer with 8 PS3s October 17, 2007 12:19pm in science |
 An astrophysics lab has replaced a supercomputer they use for research with 8 PlayStation 3 consoles. Some reasons behind this include the fact that using the supercomputers cost them $5000 a pop which adds up rather quickly. The whole idea that the PS3 can run Linux is also a plus as it allows the lab to run them the way they want uninhibited.
"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."
The 8 PS3s were donated by Sony and stringing them together with proper otimized code allows them to function very much like a supercomputer. The experiment they're running is to calculate the amount of gravity that would be generated should a black hole swallow a star. This grid has apparently been up for a month and the 8 PS3s apparently generate the processing power of about 200 supercomputer nodes that they used to use. Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s [wired.com] Tags: astronomy, playstation, linux, tech, news |
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