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The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
- capableweb 7y agoWhen reading through this I was sure this was about Folding@Home but turns out this was a different project! Strange that Folding@Home isn't even mentioned, if I recall it correctly, you could install Folding@Home easily via the store on the PS3, and a normal user could contribute. The Verge article seems more focused on customized machine (rooted to run Linux and stored at location) instead of using the standard OS and letting the contributors have the machine at home. Folding@Home seems to still be running to this day as well! Plenty of information about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home#PlayStation_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home#PlayStation_3
- theobeers 7y agoI had the same assumption. One of my college roommates (academic year 2008–09) got a PS3 and set up Folding@home on it. I thought that was so cool at the time. It was my first exposure to distributed computing (in this sense of the term).
- hi5eyes 7y agodefinitely kept my ps3 on during middle school hours/overnight running this, such a cool project they added to the system
- vagab0nd 7y agoOff-topic, what's the current state of protein folding simulation? Is it still an unsolved problem? It was mentioned pretty often as a hard problem but I stopped hearing about it a couple years ago.
- clay_the_ripper 7y ago> the PS4 can’t easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. “There’s nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, it’s just a regular old PC,” Khanna says. “We weren’t really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.” The article doesn’t really explain in detail the difference that made the ps3 an attractive buy for making super computers over regular PCs. Can someone elaborate?
- capableweb 7y agoFrom Wikipedia about another, similar project (Folding@Home) > At the time of its inception, its main streaming Cell processor delivered a 20 times speed increase over PCs for some calculations, processing power which could not be found on other systems such as the Xbox 360.[36][190] The PS3's high speed and efficiency introduced other opportunities for worthwhile optimizations according to Amdahl's law > The PS3's uniform console environment made technical support easier and made Folding@home more user friendly.[36] The PS3 also had the ability to stream data quickly to its GPU, which was used for real-time atomic-level visualizing of the current protein dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home#PlayStation_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home#PlayStation_3
- agumonkey 7y agoIronically, this is the kind of massive research that got Sony into troubles because it costed a ton and was hard for developers to master (SEGA felt this hard a decade prior), hence the Nintendo U-turn and Sony/Microsoft 90% mainstream hardware follow-up.
- tus88 7y agoMassive vector compute units.
- cortesoft 7y agoAs I recall, a big part of it was that Sony was subsidizing the powerful hardware, selling it slightly below market under the business model of making the money back by selling games to run on the systems (kind of like the printer/ink model) This meant you could buy much more hardware for the same cost verse buying the parts individually.
- combatentropy 7y agoThe processor in the PS3 was very different. It was called Cell. It had 9 cores: 1 general-purpose processor and 8 stripped-down, hot-rod processors. They were tied together by a fast bus. I think the cores could even talk to cores in other boxes more efficiently than could be done with x86 processors. Making a supercomputer from PS3s was 10 times cheaper and would run 10 times cooler. --- https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/analysis/the-playstation-supercomputer/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/analysis/the-playstation-... DISCLAIMER: I am not a chip expert. I threw together this summary after reading several articles.
- krilly 7y agoI would expect this to be more viable than ever, now that the cost of console hardware is so heavily subsidised by online subscription services.
- wmf 7y agoMost people have been saying that consoles are less subsidized now than they used to be.
- masklinn 7y agoThe CPUs of modern console are pretty standard general-purpose CPUs: the PS4 and XB1 use customised AMD APU, and the Switch uses a Tegra X1. That's not useful for supercomputers. The PS3 was using a pretty weird CPU, which importantly had a single general-purpose core but 6 SIMD co-processors, making it very useful for compute tasks on supercomputers. These days you'd use off-the-shelf compute-oriented FPGA or stream / GPGPU units paired with general-purpose CPUs e.g. OLCF-4 has 9216 general-purpose CPUs driving 27648 Tesla V100.
- DerekL 7y agoAlso, console makers collect fees from third-party game publishers, whether it's on physical media or it's downloaded. I don't know how much profit comes from each source.
- rvz 7y agoThis was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those without access to supercomputers are the ones to suffer from this decision. Sony had to appeal to their gaming community over the science community so that's that. Also it's 'OtherOS' not 'OpenOS'.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoTo play the devil's advocate, Sony is in the business of selling games, their cosnoles were just a means to that and since they were selling the hardware at a loss, selling more of it to people who will never buy games was bad for their business model.
- ascagnel_ 7y agoThere was no reason they couldn’t have sold a slightly less locked-down system to researchers at a higher price point —- Microsoft did exactly that with unsold X360 Kinect units (and bundled in a USB adapter) for medical research.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoThe reason was cost. Have fun convincing management to allocate resources to develop and support another SKU tailored for researchers.
- mschuster91 7y agoSo what? Don't need much difference in hardware, it was only a firmware change.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
- j1vms 7y ago> "The Air Force had to convince Sony to..." To be a fly on the wall during that discussion. I'm sure money wasn't an issue for the Air Force, or that Sony had some balls of steel.
- callalex 7y agoAre you implying that the Air Force is in the business of making “offers that cannot be refused” especially to foreign owned companies?
- redis_mlc 7y agoWell, actually yes. Notice how there's very few military aircraft companies in the USA? That's because the little fish got a visit from Washington saying, "that was your last contract unless you merge." Northrop tried to resist, for a while anyway. Regarding foreign companies, the Avro Arrow was cut up after the US offered Canada a northern missile defense network. The Arrow was an early Mach 2 interceptor - think of the foreign sales possibilities. Many of the designers ended up at NASA.
- rasz 7y agoactually https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/opinion/military-right-to-repair.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/opinion/military-right-to...
- gautamcgoel 7y agoIt would be awesome if you could install Linux on modern Xbox or PS4 consoles and use them as PCs...
- ascagnel_ 7y agoI’m not sure how much of a benefit that’d be at this point — the PS3 was some custom hardware that was unique to its era, while the current consoles are 5-year-old x86 chips running custom OSes. Putting Linux into that mix only gets you a stable, but outdated, hardware platform.
- gautamcgoel 7y agoI was really thinking more about the upcoming PS5 and Xbox Scarlett, which both should have Zen 2 CPUs and Navi GPUs, along with a generous helping of GDDR6 memory and SSDs.
- ascagnel_ 7y agoAt launch, those systems will probably be very competitive with off-the-shelf PCs. By 2022, they won't look as good. One thing these new consoles are doing that seems interesting is that they use a huge pool of unified RAM (rather than two independent pools of main+video memory).
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoThe Xbox One already runs UWP apps. But I guess not Win32 or a standard Windows desktop?
- walrus01 7y agoThe hardware on a PS4 Pro or an Xbox One X is pretty anemic CPU-compute wise compared to what you could build for near the same cost. Something like a $190 Ryzen 3600 on a $100 motherboard. Add RAM and a small low cost SSD, or just do network boot/PXE. Total cost might be somewhat more than buying a PS4 Pro but it would run circles around it in any cpu intensive application.
- 7y ago
- moonbug 7y agoIt was a cute way to get a Cell processor running Linux for an order of magnitude less than any other option, during the brief window where that processor looked like it was going to be future of high performance CPUs. (Anyone else here have the misfortune to work with LLNL's Roadrunner?). But then IBM killed it, and Nvidia came along and ate the market.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoLANL had the Roadrunner. LLNL had BlueGene/L at the time.
- moonbug 7y agoquite so. time and autocorrect.
- gok 7y agoThe entire interest in this came from the fact that Sony was selling PS3s at a loss, hoping to make up for it with game sales. They were willing to put up with people buying them for compute for a little bit for marketing but it was never going to be sustainable system.
- walrus01 7y agoThat wire rack shelf (sans wheels) is still how some low budget colocation/dedicated server operators set up their hardware. Minitower or mid-tower microatx/ATX sized cases with low cost motherboards, CPU, power supplies. A cheap microatx sized tower case with one rear exhaust fan is $35. Each system with one or two cat5e cables and a single power cable. In really low cost colocation facilities the limiting factor is often total kW of electricity and cooling available, not square footage of floor space. It's been a common thing in the datacenter/dedicated server business for about 18-20 years. The same general idea was adopted by Bitcoin miners using ASIC hardware, and later on with Ethereum mining again with systems using two or four GPUs connected to a low-cost ATX motherboard.
- lozaning 7y agoIf you're not running 7+ cards on a mining rig you're probably doing it wrong. The higher the number of cards you run in a rig the more you can distribute the cost of the non mining hardware (HD, mobo, cpu, memory) across cards. A mobo that supports 8 cards might be double the cost of a board that supports 4 cards, but it prevents you from having to buy a second cpu, a second hard drive, second psu, and more memory to put in your second cheapo mobo. Now if you can buy random cheap ATX boxes for less than $27 dollars per PCI-E slot you are better off initially, but then management across all your various junk boxes becomes a PITA quick.
- walrus01 7y agoThe last time I spent 15 minutes doing a possible ROI calculation on a GPU based Ethereum mining system, about a year ago, I came to the conclusion that the upfront cost of buying the GPUs alone, plus the electricity (entirely ignoring the cost of a dedicated mining purpose motherboard and cpu/ram, power supply, etc) would not have a reasonable payback period. Even if the electricity was 1.5 cents a kWh, and cooling was free. I've seen the various motherboards from Taiwanese board manufacturers which are designed for mining, with many small pci-express 3.0 slots intended for use with riser ribbon/interface cards, such as for use as you describe with 8 GPUs attached to one motherboard. https://www.techradar.com/news/best-mining-motherboards https://www.techradar.com/news/best-mining-motherboards
- Finnucane 7y agoI have a recollection that at the time when this sort of thing became possible, that there was some worry that unfriendly nations could use this to get around technology export restrictions (what no, we're not buying a supercomputer--we're just buying 500 game consoles for our weapons designers).
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoI love the plug for Person of Interest and was surprised that the original ones from the Air Force ended up there.
- DCKing 7y agoThe Playstation 1, 2 and 3 are each in their own way Sony's take on an alternate history of computer graphics. It was Sony's intent with all three consoles to put the "special effects" (that in 2019 are performed using shaders) in the CPU, and not the GPU. As a result, the PS1, but especially the PS2 and PS3 were engineered to have amazing vector capabilities in the CPU. The PS2's Emotion Engine had extremely high performance vector processing units, and was so optimized for compute throughput it used two different floating point formats, neither of which are compatible with the IEEE754 standard that every other piece of hardware you've ever touched uses. The PS3 was the culmination of that philosophy, with the Cell being explicitly developed to put as much raw number crunching hardware in something that can still be called a CPU. It was just a single unimpressive POWER-compatible CPU core, and 60% of its die area went to specifically engineered number crunching units. This is what made it "supercomputer grade". There's a persistent rumor that the Cell was so powerful that Sony had intended for the Playstation 3 to be equipped with two Cell chips, and no true GPU at all. But it seems Sony realized during development that their philosophy had no future. Sony compromised and introduced a standard Geforce GPU. Compared to the more conventional architecture of the Xbox 360, the compromised design still had slightly more potential but it was a lot more difficult to work with for games, and more expensive to produce as well. Starting with the last generation of consoles, homegrown graphics architectures aren't tried anymore. You can only get performance and especially good developer buy-in on commodity hardware. As a result, the PS4 and Xbox One have PC hardware. Their successors will too. The Nintendo Switch shares a chip with the Nvidia Shield TV and Google Pixel C tablet. Console hardware is not really interesting anymore if you ask me.
- forrestthewoods 7y ago> Console hardware is not really interesting anymore if you ask me. Agreed. And that’s a good thing. PS1, PS2, and PS3 were all underpowered. I’ll never forgive the PS2 for holding back games for 7 years. Grumble grumble. PS3 may technically not have been slower. But if it takes 2x the effort to get a 10% improvement it is in practice. Everything’s a PC now. Which means the focus can be on making good games instead of optimizing for specialized hardware to serve a fraction of the audience.
- aorth 7y agoSeriously surprised that the article didn't mention Iraq buying 4,000 PlayStation 2's in the year 2000. I think Saddam was doing some supercomputing. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/19/iraq_buys_4000_playstation_2s/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/19/iraq_buys_4000_play...
- investologia 7y agohe article neglects that the PS3 supercomputer was popular because Sony sold them at a loss. No hardware manufacturer does this any more.
- needle0 7y ago"Supercomputer projects needed the original PS3, not the PS3 Slim, because Sony had removed Linux support from the console in response to hacks — which later led to a class-action settlement. This article originally stated that it was because the PS3 Slim was less powerful. We regret the error." Wonder what made the writer originally assume that? Mid-generation console refreshes would be the one occurence where much care would be taken to keep the performance not faster, not slower, but completely identical against the original hardware. I remember reading somewhere that the Xbox 360 refreshes had some hardware to intentionally add latency for inter-chip communications to keep performance identical.