Quick Jump Daily Digest
Thank you for your interest in the Quick Jump Daily Digest. Get notified of all new content on QJ in our free Daily Digest. To subscribe, enter your email address below and click the subscribe button.
PlayStation 3 Cell Chip used to make fastest supercomputer again |
Listed in: PS3 Tags: dual-core, IBM, Opteron, petaflop, Supercomputer
Ó
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:
| 50% of voters think this story ROCKS! |
|
|
Comments
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
and... how many desktop computers is that?
Reply
Nah, it's not possible.
*cue dramatic music* Or is it?
Reply
MINESWEEPER IN HI-DEF!!!!!
xD
Reply
Reply
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.
Reply
Reply
Reply
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.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply