PS3 Cluster Supercomputer - step-by-step

A very interesting link .. a set-by-step guide to setting up a cluster of PS3 as a supercomputer.

http://www.ps3cluster.org/

Update Article on Installing Ubunto on PS3 (with better pictures)

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how_to/4263321.html

Cell Processor - Beyond a gaming processor

Found this link that is very intriguing.

Its suggests that a newer "low power" version of the cell processor is coming out. And the next best industry to make use of it .. will be in medicine. I think Folding@home proved the power of the PS3 in medical research ... but this blogger's suggestion that live medical devices like 3d CAT-scans, live interactive medical imaging .. will be the next big hit.

I thinks that's a great idea! When you think about it .. live 3D interaction is not too different than a hi-resolution FPS (first person shooter). Ignoring, of course, the data stream requirements. Which in this case is what would limit the use of a standard PS3 (digital CAT scans can already generate 6 Gigabytes / sec data streams ... ignoring the whole packet buffering issue .. that out-classes the PS3's 1000Base-T LAN connection).

Now think of the same CAT scanner connected to a custom box with two or three cell processors .. with a 10G network link. Haven't run the numbers .. but I'm pretty sure there's enough horse power there for a custom app to display and modify (read filter) what is being displayed. Imagine now a dynamic disease filter that identifies and highlights on the 3D image ... in real time.

Its a brave new world in interactive medicine!

Update:
Looks like there is plenty of motion in this direction:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34085/118/ IBM Opens first cell research center on college campus.
http://news.soft32.com/mayo-clinic-and-ibm-to-improve-medical-research_5824.html Mayo Clinic and IBM to Improve Medical Research.

Toshiba puts a Cell chip in a laptop?

CNet is reporting on a "Toshiba Spurs Engine". Apparently they put an IBM Cell processor into a Toshiba Laptop.
Here's the link: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/video/0,139101587,49295004,00.htm

SPU-Medialib has Cell/PS3 optimized programs to accelerate media related content

Looks like a project called spu-medialib has a collection of media library code optimized for the Cell processor. This should allow MythTV to make full use of the Cell SPU units (the power behind the PS3).

Link is http://wiki.ps2dev.org/ps3:spu-medialib

Gemmell spots someone succesfully running MythTV on the PS3

Thanks to gemmell for this link: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/299490

It appears someone has classic MythTV running on the PS3. It will be interesting to see if they get reliable HD decoding with out using the cell processors. Or, perhaps they found a port of the libmpeg for the cell.

Terra Soft uses PS3 for a Stereo Vision Setup in DARPA's Urban Challange

Yet another awesome use of PS3 cells. Terra Soft has built a stereo vision system based on the PS3.
Slashdot is reporting it was used in Axion Racing's entry to the DARPA Urban Challenge.

Links:
Terr Soft: http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/showcase/cellebration/axion/tss.shtml
Slashdot Discussion: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/30/161252
DARPA urban challenge: http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/

Need Help .. What else should be posted?

Since there doesn't appear to be much work on porting mpeg libraries to the cell processor in Linux (to make use of the massive parallel processors) ... What else should I write about?

Have a good post or link you want to see here? Just post it as a comment and I will add the really good ones as new posts.

--Thanks,
PS3Penguin

Sony has launched and "Official" PS Blog

It appears to cover the entire "Play Station family"
http://blog.us.playstation.com/

A bunch of links about Compiling code for the PS3 / Cell

Haven't had much time to go through these yet .. but I wanted to make sure they got captured.
Here are some pages that have links to either compilers, compiler extensions or SDKs for the PS3 or Cell processor.

Linux devices - http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5311012332.html
Sony Computer - http://cell.scei.co.jp/e_download.html
Game Tomorrow - http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/2005/11/09/cell-sdk-now-available-for-download/
IBM - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

StreamIt - Not to be out done .. MIT has a new language focused on Multicore computing

As MIT puts it StreamIt
"is a programming language and a compilation infrastructure, specifically engineered for modern streaming systems. It is designed to facilitate the programming of large streaming applications ..."

http://cag.csail.mit.edu/streamit/

Technology Review has a good summary at http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18597/

IBM Octopiler -- A new compiler aid to port to Cell processing?

It appears IBM has a new aid to help develop more applications that make use of the Cell processor.

From the following link:
"Our aim is to automatically generate high quality code taking advantage of the wide range of heterogeneous parallelism for Scale-Up and Scale-Out architectures. We propose "single source" compiler solutions for heterogeneous memory and computational subsystems using automatically-partitioned code and data, as well as software-managed cache for irregular data accesses. We exploit parallelism at all levels, including data and task level parallelism as well as SIMD parallelism."

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.index.html?Open&printable

Slashdot reports: 250,000 PS3s Folding@Home

Slashdot has an interesting post about how the PS3 has helped Folding@home reach 250,000 users with over 700 terraflops of processing power. Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off the floor .... wow .. thats a lot of processing power.

Check it out at http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/04/25/184201.shtml

Shameless PS3 Promotion Video

Sorry for the shameless promotion video .. but I LOVE how the PR guy describes the unique quality of the PS3 .. and wacthing the rain drop demo is pretty cool too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwCDhMJ6-r4

.. this one is pretty good too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sknTNbM8vTo

More PS3 videos ... All In English this time!

Ran across this nice (lots of interesting video to keep you interested in watching it :) ) video
of upgrading the PS3 to a 100GB hard drive ..then installing Yellow Dog linux on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC5BEof-jd8

I ran across 2 english Videos showing Fedora Core 5 running on the PS3 .. now if I can find a "how-to install" video ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZXcuhJkwx4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45eNPrIT9Qw

And .. a "1TB PS3 ... "(he cheated and used an external USB drive .. but hey .. give him credit for originality)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThNU0ltoWzo

Folding@Home on the PS3

Check out the stats for the PS3 doing the Folding@Home project. Wow ..

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

This is what I saw at 2:30pm on March 23, 2007

OS Type	Current TFLOPS*	Active CPUs	Total CPUs
Windows	151	159198	1624934
Mac OS X/PowerPC	7	8716	95341
Mac OS X/Intel	8	2716	7216
Linux	42	24971	215703
GPU	41	700	2188
PLAYSTATION®3	367	14971	15914
Total	616	211272	1961296

Riding The Multi-core Revolution Demo

Here is a long .. but very interesting presentation called "Riding the Multi-core Revolution Demo"
It discusses the trends of Parallel processing .. and multi core computing and the effects on software development.

Covered in the demo is a discussion of GPU use for specialized software computation (other than graphics)
It also mentions IBM's Cell processor use of specialized multi-cores .. talking about how to write scalable programs to make use of it.

about 32 mins into the Demo .. is the "16,000" chicken demo referenced earlier in the blog.
http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/Riding%2520The%2520Multi-core%2520Revolution.html

Reduce your memory footprint: IBM article

While reading "Geek Patrol" I ran across this relevant link titled "How to reduce your memory footprint" http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linux-memory.html.

Geek Patrol Performance: PS3 vs. Mac G5

The "Geek Patrol" website has a pretty interesting comparison between the Mac G5 and the PS3.

Keep in mind .. the PS3 is not running with any "cell" optimizations .. so its really a good benchmark to see how the "stripped down" power pc in the PS3 compares to a Mac version.

http://www.geekpatrol.ca/2006/11/playstation-3-performance/

48 Simultaneous SDTV streams decoded by Cell Processor

Finally found a reference to an old (2005) trade show demonstration .. where the cell processor decoded 48 SDTV MPEG-2 streams simultaneously! No I don't think this was done on a PS3 .. but it shows the power of the cell processor. HDTV is roughly 4 SDTV streams ... so you could infer 12 HDTV streams (maybe 10 to be safe) ... now thats PIP!

From the article:
"Toshiba demonstrated that its Cell microprocessor, jointly developed with the Sony Group and IBM Corp., can simultaneously decode 48 SDTV format MPEG-2 streams. At the COOL Chips VIII event held in Yokohama from April 20 to 22, 2005, the company showed a film demonstrating the decoding process"

Here is the article link: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20050425/104149/