Math Problem: Supercomputer x1 or PS3 x8?
John Tyra | August 13th, 2008Which is greater? Well, for Dr. Gaurav Khanna, the eight PS3(s) would be the answer. In this Wired magazine article submitted by our viewer ’stone cold’, it speaks about using eight PS3 gaming consoles for a “gravity grid”. Sure, these are just mear gaming consoles, but according to the article ” his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on”.
At first, this sounded odd, but remember: Sony made the PS3 an open platform, so you can do anything you want with it if you can write the code for it. Another quote about the hardware that makes you think twice about such abilities…
It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time
Regardless of how powerful these are for parallel computing, it is funny to see these PS3(s) in a server rack.
