by Steve Hansen | 22nd October 2007

Well, you still can’t play Halo 3 on it, but a UMass professor has a more practical use in mind for his PS3. Dr. Gaurav Khanna, an assistant professor at UMass, created an 8 node cluster using PS3s to run models to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for nearly 100 years but never observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day.
In the past, Dr. Khanna had rented time on various supercomputing sites across the US, typically using a couple hundred processors and costing as much as $5,000 of his grant money.

Khanna’s cluster has been up and running for a little over a month. He says that the cluster is roughly equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on. Read more at Wired…

PS3 clusters have been created by other researchers as well. One of the pioneers is a North Carolina State University Professor, Dr.Frank Mueller, who created an 8 node PS3 cluster back in March of this year for a total cost of about $5,000.

Interested in the idea, but not sure about where to begin? Terra Soft Solutions is offering turnkey PS3 clusters. An 8 node cluster will set you back about $21,500 and a 32 node cluster $52,250. Besides the obvious cost of the consoles, for that price you also get a dual-proc Power Mac G5, a 48 port switch, Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed (developed and maintained by Terra Soft for the Power architecture family of CPUs), 7 cat 6 cables, mouse, keyboard, 19″ display, and 20 hours or technical support.

by Steve Hansen | 22nd October 2007

Well, you still can’t play Halo 3 on it, but a UMass professor has a more practical use in mind for his PS3. Dr. Gaurav Khanna, an assistant professor at UMass, created an 8 node cluster using PS3s to run models to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for nearly 100 years but never observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day.
In the past, Dr. Khanna had rented time on various supercomputing sites across the US, typically using a couple hundred processors and costing as much as $5,000 of his grant money.

Khanna’s cluster has been up and running for a little over a month. He says that the cluster is roughly equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on. Read more at Wired…

PS3 clusters have been created by other researchers as well. One of the pioneers is a North Carolina State University Professor, Dr.Frank Mueller, who created an 8 node PS3 cluster back in March of this year for a total cost of about $5,000.

Interested in the idea, but not sure about where to begin? Terra Soft Solutions is offering turnkey PS3 clusters. An 8 node cluster will set you back about $21,500 and a 32 node cluster $52,250. Besides the obvious cost of the consoles, for that price you also get a dual-proc Power Mac G5, a 48 port switch, Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed (developed and maintained by Terra Soft for the Power architecture family of CPUs), 7 cat 6 cables, mouse, keyboard, 19″ display, and 20 hours or technical support.