Yes, as the ability to turn the flops is there, just the general instructions are limited or missing.

It is funny, but the reason why so much has gone into GPU's is really to make sure you can see your online enemy being dispatched and alll the blood splattering effects, with vivid clarity.

Thought it would be interesting to check to see how much the worthless ps3 processors have churned out with more than 2x as many 'computers' connected.


As of January 5, 2008, the Folding@home project has received computational results from over 2.7 million devices[2] over the course of its time.

On September 16, 2007, the Folding@home project officially attained a performance level higher than one petaFLOPS, becoming the first computing system of any kind to do so, although it had briefly peaked above one petaFLOPS in March 2007.[13][14]. In comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the world (as of March 2008, the University of Texas' Ranger supercomputer) peaks at 504 teraFLOPS (1000 teraFLOPS=1 petaFLOP)[15]. The Folding@home supercomputer currently operates at above 1 petaFLOPs at all times, with a large majority of the performance coming from PlayStation 3 clients.[2]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40home





Boffin stacks 16 PS3s to simulate black hole collisions
66 comments
By Scott Snowden [More by this author]
28th February 2008 00:02 GMT
When most of us arrived home with our newly purchased PS3, we couldn't wait to start annihilating aliens in Resistance: Fall of Man or kicking butt kung fu-style in Virtua Fighter 5. Not astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna - he used his to build a supercomputer.

Khanna now owns a total of 16 PS3 consoles, all linked together to provide the same computing power as a 400-node supercomputer. His set up, which he calls a 'gravity grid', is used to simulate the activity of very large black holes for the Physics Department at the University of Massachusetts.


Stacked Sonies: the 'gravity grid' set up
The project is an attempt to estimate the properties of gravity waves generated by the collision of two black holes. Gravitational waves are 'ripples' in space-time that travel at the speed of light. These were theoretically predicted by Einstein's general relativity, but have never been directly observed.

In order to run his simulation data on the consoles, Khanna had to load the PS3s with Linux. What makes the gaming console more effective than high-end computers for complex research algorithms is the Cell chip built by IBM to process high-end gaming functions.


Linux powered
"Linux can turn any system into a general-purpose computer, but for it to work for me I have to run my own code on it for astrophysics applications. The hard part of the job was to make sure my own calculations could run fast on the platform, which meant I had to optimise the written code so it could utilise the new features of the system."

Related stories
Man webcams butt in Burnout Paradise prang rage
Sony preps Blu-ray boosting PS3 bundle
Hefty black hole weighs in at 33 Suns
Big Blue talks up 45nm PlayStation 3 processor possibilities
Satin PS3 to launch in Japan
Black holes blamed for super-charged cosmic rays
Sony PlayStation 3


The 16 PS3s haven't been physically modified. They're networked together using an inexpensive Gigabit Ethernet switch.

"Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer," Khanna noted.

More details from Khanna's project site here.

so that makes the difference...nice one!

my PS3 crunches on Folding@home - check the stats in signature from 18.feb 2008.! i'm yet prepared to switch to Linux and experiment on it! hopefully there is sthg in those 8cores to crunch away...

but what gets me a loittle angry is that the PS3 uses nVidia graphics, but for the PCs they have only X1800 or later support! stupid, right?

We can only repeat the repeated. The science has to be designed for the cell chip and WCG does not make projects, WCG hosts them! So unless the science proposed to WCG is suitable, it wont fly. To take the words of the WCG admin "we'd love to get a project for this platform".

IBM (the sole sponsor of WCG), the maker of the chip, is working on a supercomputer that has a mix of these cell + regular CPU's, so I think they know what they're talking about.

Hello,

I recently installed the new GPU-2 client for Folding@Home, which use a wide diversity of video cards. I know that Boinc does not have any gpu-supported project, but I have a question : do you know if WCG is currently working with a project team that will work on GPU ? Even if this project is not ready yet...

It's just to know if there is someone working on Boinc GPU client at this time.

With only one core and a low-end video card (Radeon HD 2600 XT), the gain is x2 or x3 ...