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PlayStation 3 Cell Chip used to make fastest supercomputer again

Posted Jun 10, 2008 at 3:53AM EST by QJ Staff

Listed in: PS3 Tags: dual-core, IBM, Opteron, petaflop, Supercomputer

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Last year, IBM built the Blue Gene/P, then the world's fastest supercomputer, powered by the PlayStation 3's almighty Broadband Cell Chip. Now, the Blue Gene/P has been usurped by an even faster supercomputer, and it is to the PlayStation 3's credit that its Cell Chip was used yet again to power it as well.

Called the Roadrunner, the supercomputer was designed for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, and cost around US$ 100 million to build. The Roadrunner is a hybrid, and so doesn't purely run on the PS3 Chip: it has 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips and 12,960 Cell engines powering it.

Just how fast is the Roadrunner? Well, it runs on speeds exceeding a petaflop. What's a petaflop? It's one quadrillion calculations per second, or one thousand trillion calculations per second. If these numbers are meaningless to you, let's put it this way: you'll need 100,000 of today's fastest laptops to equal the Roadrunner's power.

That's fast. Meep meep. So what does the Department of Energy plan to use it for anyhoo? Check out the mini-documentary below to find out more about the Roadrunner. No Wile E. Coyote in sight either:

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People with calculators doing years of computation means nothing to anyone. In fact, as the comments on Slashdot pointed out, 2/3 of those people would not know what to do with their calculators, and would much rather have food (or eat it) than be given a calculator for a useless analogy.

This is NOT a desktop! As awesome as a thousands-of-cores system would be, it just doesn't work that way. Desktop computing is just beginning to take advantage of dual-core machines, as software needs to be written with multi-core use in mind. What a setup like this is for would be advanced simulations. Yes, your PhysX cards calculate physics, but not with the accuracy and precision that the government needs to manage its nuclear weapons. With this system, they can test their aging weapons and essentially determine when they'll no longer be useful or become unsafe. Some other examples include testing what happens when a weapon is dropped, from any angle or height, etc. This demands hardcore computing power, theoretically using one core for every vertex of whatever's being tested.

If anything, the wonder of it all is the PROGRAMMING, not the hardware! Interfacing all those cores and keeping them synchronized is not an easy task.

A last note, the Cell chips used are not the same as the chips powering our beloved gaming machine. While Sony spurred the development of the Cell for its own purposes, IBM has made revisions. The PS3 Cell is supposedly not as accurate or precise as the new generation of chips. Other changes include higher RAM limit and such.

# ... — Matt-N 2008-06-11 03:21

You're so interesting[/sarcasm]

# lol — Binary 2008-06-11 04:42

Minesweeper FTW

# . — Binary 2008-06-11 04:49

I want that Chip!

That be cool if somebody homemade a motherboard off a PS3. That would really kick some ass. PS2 emulator(Pcsx 0.9.4) at full speed. Windows will ***** itself.

man I want a supercomputer. not a quad, SUPER one.

# pcht... — Dremth 2008-06-12 07:01

my computer can do that [/sarcasm]

# . — Dremth 2008-06-12 07:03

they will either use linux, or even more likely, write their own OS to use this setup.

# Old — UltimaXIX 2008-06-16 09:08

I had one of those back when I was was young... But they wern't called Compooters, they were called Scooters, and they used wheels instead of fans and they had handles instead of keyboards...

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