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PS3 turned into supercomputer

14 February 2008 14:51 - (SA)


Paris - Researchers are cannibalising the Sony PlayStation 3 console and other gaming hardware, turning them into low-cost supercomputers to model pharmaceutical molecules and black holes, the weekly New Scientist says.

The PS3 console uses a Cell chip, made by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, that comprises a central processing unit and eight slave processors and can run on the open-access Linux operating system.

The chip is prized by chemists and physicists because the kinds of calculations required to make high-quality graphics for games are similar to those used to simulate reactions between particles, ranging from the molecular to the astronomical.

University of Massachusetts astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna has strung together 16 PS consoles to simulate gravity waves that occur when two black holes collide, the British magazine says.

Another innovation is a graphics processor made by NVIDIA that boosts gaming-image quality in personal computers.

By using the C programming language to run the chip, University of Illinois chemist Todd Martinez found he could run calculations 130 times faster than on an ordinary PC.


More at: News24.com