So games consoles can be useful after all!

[hazel]

I have never seen the point of computer games - I mean for myself; I don't of course mind other people playing them as long as they're adult (I do think they are very bad for children, who ought to be playing vigorous games outside, not sitting indoors crouched over a games console). But today I read in the New Scientist that you can actually use these consoles as supercomputers.

Apparently you can run Linux on a Sony Playstation. Not a lot of people know that! So you can reprogram them to do other things than gaming. And the matrix arithmetic that they use for high-quality graphics rendering can also be used for things like modelling the behaviuour and interactions of complex organic molecules. Previously you had to hire time on a supercomputer to do this sort of thing. Now you can do it on a Playstation for a fraction of the cost.

Isn't that amazing?

[ryokimball]

Oh, yes! I have been drooling over the PS3 ever since I heard of it. I am a very serious gamer, but the first thing I would do is put Linux on it and make it my computer. The cell-processor is an amazing piece of work in it's own right, and I am hoping for it to take over the mainstream A.S.A.P.

[Roxoff]

Here at work we produce software that analyses heat-flow and emc of electronic devices, and there has been a push for a long while to move all the complex maths into the gpu on the grahics card. These things are designed from the ground-up to crunch floating point numbers at an incredible rate, and there are developer kits available for them now too. It's very similar to the playstation specialisation that you mention.

[hazel]

Here at work we produce software that analyses heat-flow and emc of electronic devices, and there has been a push for a long while to move all the complex maths into the gpu on the grahics card. These things are designed from the ground-up to crunch floating point numbers at an incredible rate, and there are developer kits available for them now too. It's very similar to the playstation specialisation that you mention.

Yes, the same article mentions using an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX card in a similar way.
Here is the link.