From PlayStation to supercomputer
By John Markoff
The New York Times
May 27, 2003, 7:16 AM PT
As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the power of sophisticated but inexpensive game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2 devices.
The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000. Researchers at the supercomputing center believe the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second, well within the definition of supercomputer, although it may not rank among the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open-source Linux operating system, is that the only hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the individual game machines in a rack and plugging them together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch. The center's scientists bought 100 machines but are holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display application.
"It took a lot of time because you have to cut all of these things out of the plastic packaging," said Craig Steffen, a senior research scientist at the center, who is one of four scientists working part time on the project.
The scientists are taking advantage of a standard component of the PS2 that was originally intended to move and transform pixels rapidly on a television screen to produce lifelike graphics. That chip is not the PlayStation 2's MIPS microprocessor, but rather a graphics co-processor known as the Emotion Engine. That custom-designed silicon chip is capable of producing up to 6.5 billion mathematical operations a second.
The impressive performance of the game machine, which has been on the market for a few years, underscores a radical shift that has taken place in the computing world since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, according to the researchers.
While the most advanced computing technologies have historically been developed first for large corporate users and military contractors, increasingly the fastest computers are being developed for the consumer market and for products meant to be placed under Christmas trees.
"If you look at the economics of game platforms and the power of computing on toys, this is a long-term market trend and computing trend," said Dan Reed, the supercomputing center's director. "The economics are just amazing. This is going to drive the next big wave in high-performance computing."
The scientists have their eyes on a variety of consumer hardware, he said. For example Nvidia, the maker of graphics cards for PCs, is now selling a high-performance graphics card capable of executing 51 billion mathematical operations per second.
The pace of the consumer computing world is moving so quickly that the researchers are building the PlayStation 2-based supercomputer as an experiment to see how quickly they can take advantage of off-the-shelf, low-cost technologies.
