PS3 Supercomputer

I wonder how long it will be before someone makes the first large PS3 cluster.

I was at a recent lecture by Dr Adam Vile, Head of Grid, HPC and Technical computing at Excelian LTD. He suggested that a cluster of 270 PS3s would be more powerful than world's #2 Blue Gene (approx 91k GFlops) Supercomputer.

If his performance predictions are correct, we can expect this sooner rather than later! I can't imagine business will do it until they have rack mounted machines. However expect the academics to pull it off in the very near future.

Another interesting estimate comes from the Folding at Home project which estimates that 20,000 PS3s would give 1 petaflop performance. Indeed with the recent addition of the PS3, Folding @ Home is now the most powerful distributed computing resource on the planet, and for the calculations they run (parallel independent molecular dynamics trajectories), the most powerful supercomputer of any type (distributed or otherwise).

Not bad for a humble games console.