DISQUS

Nick · 1 year ago

Sounds awesome, but...

Isn't the PS3 (the 7-SPE Cell processor) capable of achieving almost a TFLOP by itself? Even though that is only with single-floating-point numbers, that is much cheaper... what would the difference be between this BlueGene supercomputer and a mere 30 or so PS3s? Not to mention if you added a powerful cooling system and overclocked them. In fact, I heard that the most powerful supercomputing cluster in history was in fact a collection of PS3s combined over the internet to achieve over 1 PFLOP, albeit with a extremely slow "system bus" (the internet).

Andy · 1 year ago

Yeah. I'm not sure the version of Blue Gene that the University ordered has it, but IBM plans to start making the Blue Gene with the Cell Brodband engine (with all 8 SPEs, the PS3 has one disabled)

the collection of PS3's your thinking of is Stanford Universities Folding@Home application. and yes it is over 1PFLOP. (hundreds of thousands of PS3s have signed up. something like 33000 active PS3s. I have my PS3 running the program right now)

and if you wanted to you can buy a cluster of PS3's, you can get them from Terra Soft (with Yellow dog linux installed) for $17500(8node) or $42000 (32node).

With the supercomputer you would get more ram, and many more processors. Like it says up there, the blue gene has over 8000 processors. and to reach 1PFLOP you would need over near 30k processors.

James · 1 year ago

Quote:

and to reach 1PFLOP you would need over near 30k processors.

Off by a bit...should be near 300k processors

But · 1 year ago

Should be some new munitions coming out of Moscow soon.

Jtegg007 · 1 year ago

Awesome, Do you think it could handle Crysis?

xD

jonny rocket · 1 year ago

do you think it has a back-door?

lol · 1 year ago

lol or more appropriately, how many back-doors does it have? :)

Nirmal · 1 year ago

Yes it is Good Thing atlast Russia is recognized in Super Computing as an intelligent Computing Nation