Sony PS3, ’solving a celestial mystery’
p2pnet news | Product News:- At last! Someone’s found something genuinely useful to do with a Sony product!
Says Dr Gaurav Khanna’s home page:
Dr. Khanna works on different problems in theoretical and computational astrophysics: Coalescence of binary black hole systems using black hole perturbation theory and estimation of properties of the gravitational radiation emitted; “Tails” of gravitational waves from rotating black holes and also certain aspects of loop quantum gravity, including cosmology and black holes.
Now, “Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony’s PlayStation 3 isn’t exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block,” says CNET News.
But, “while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research”.
Why? Because a cluster of eight inter-linked PS3s is, “busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star,” says the story.
Yeh, but why the PS3?
It has, “a number of unique features that make it particularly suited for scientific computation,” Khanna posts, going on:
To start with, the PS3 is an open platform, which essentially means that one can run a different system software on it, for example, PowerPC Linux. Next, it has a revolutionary processor called the Cell processor which was developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. This processor has a main CPU, called the PPU and several (six for the PS3) special compute engines, called SPUs available for raw computation. Moreover, each SPU performs vector operations, which implies that it can compute on multiple data, in a single step.
Finally, its incredibly low cost makes it very attractive as a scientific computing node, that is part of a cluster. In fact, its highly plausible that the raw computing power per dollar that the PS3 offers, is significantly higher than anything else on the market today!
OK. But why the PS3?
“For the first time, Sony made PlayStation with an open platform, meaning it’s not completely controlled by Sony,” Wicked Local Somerset has Khanna saying, adding:
People can crack it open and do what they want with it.
Ahhhhhhh 
“Khanna expects to publish the results of his research in the next few months,” says CNET, adding:
“So while PS3 owners continue to wait for a fuller range of PS3 titles and low prices, at least they’ll have some reading material to pass the time.
Also See:
CNET News – Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s, October 17, 2007
Wicked Local Somerset – Powered by PlayStations, October 7, 2007
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October 18th, 2007 at 4:50 am
The picture of Dr Khanna looks more like Mr Bean. After that, I couldn’t really read the article without laughing……
October 18th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
As a fellow Mr Bean look alike, I feel your pain Dr Khanna.
October 19th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Actually, it’s more accurate to say that they’ve made an open platform for the SECOND time, but the first time with the PS2 EE, you had to buy an extra kit to enable that open platform, and that kit almost doubled the cost of the system. The Cell is about 30x as fast as the EE as well…