Quote:
Originally posted by walktalker
[b]
From PlayStation to supercomputer
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.
http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-1010037.html?tag=fd_top
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posted this over at PCTT....a few days ago
good story on it thanx WT...
Playstation 2: Computational Cluster
The NCSA has constructed a Playstation 2 Linux cluster as a test bench for scientific computation on "toy" hardware. The cluster consists of 65 compute nodes, 4 user login and development nodes, and 1 prototype node for software installation tests. All the nodes run the Sony Linux distribution for Playstation 2. The compute nodes fill a 24-inch rack; 5 shelves at 13 per shelf (see left);
Software
The Sony Linux kit (for Playstation 2) includes a full Linux operating system. This distribution uses Linux 2.2.1 ported to the Playstation's Emotion Engine CPU, and is based on an earlier version of Red Hat Linux for PC's. The distribution inclues development tools that you would expect; libraries, editors, compilers and debuggers that you'd find in any Linux distribution. The kit also includes software tools that provide hooks into the Playstation 2 specific hardware.
Several other pieces of software have been built for the cluster that were not available from the distribution. These include tools to make the nodes work together. We have built and installed pbs, maui, Argonne's mpich, and open-ssh. Since most any software that will build on a Linux mips system will build on the Playstation 2 Linux kit, any mips-compatible software with source code available can be run on the cluster. (Even though the core cpu has mips compatible architecture, it is not directly binary compatible with Linux mips binaries.)
Installation Process
Thanks to Perry Melange, Paulo Cortes, Mario Medina, Elizabeth Partridge and Pedro Derose of the U of I Computer Science department for installing the hard drives and ethernet modules in these machines.
The operating system install on each machine was performed using a ramdisk image set up by Perry Malange. This image partitioned and formatted the hard drive, and downloaded and uncompressed file system images, then reset the boot configuration and rebooted. This was done to make sure occasional differences would not exist between nodes, and lower the time needed for a complete re-install.
Network Configuration:
The Linux kit includes a module that attaches to the back that provides a 100baseT ethernet network interface. The Playstations are networked together through ethernet via two HP procurve 2650 switches, roughly half the cluster connected to each. The two switches are connected together at 1 GB/s, and to the firewall/fileserver at the same speed.
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