Battlestar Galactica Series 3 Finale

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.

Playstation3

I am very impressed with my new PS3.

I turned up for the midnight ‘party’ on launch to collect my shiny new toy. I was quite surprised how few people actually knew much about them. There didn’t seen to have been much information in the general press or even sent to those of us who’d put deposit’s down.

So what can this new machine do. Well, so far I’ve:
- connected it to my Wi-Fi network – really simple
- downloaded and updated the firmware – again really simple
- surfed the internet – it was simple
- downloaded free games and trailers – simple
- watched DVDs – the quality of the playback is much better than the PS2
- watched Blu Ray movies – wow, stunning, even on an SD TV
- played Motorstorm – great graphics, good soundtrack, great gameplay
- played Resistance : Fall of Man – again, wonderful
- performed some Folding at Home – an excellent distributed computing project

Still to come is installing Linux which will give full access to Firefox for browsing, Thunderbird for mail and a host of other excellent free applications.

It’s also the small things that make it so nice. The controllers and DVD remote use Bluetooth, so you don’t have to even point them at the console. Hide it in a cupboard if you like! It has a single large cooling fan, not perfectly quiet, but a very good effort. It can be turned off from the remote. It’s just very well thought out.

Well done Sony. What a machine. It will keep chavs and techies off the streets for years to come!