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Who said that gaming consoles can not benefit science? For example, a physicist Gurav Khanna assembled a huge supercomputer from the PlayStaion 3 consoles and now he uses it to investigate gravitational waves and black holes.
An American Indian physicist Gurav Khanna from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth spent seven years of his life to assemble a supercomputer that would be able to carry out the most complex calculations needed in his studies. And everything began in the distant 2007.
It was then that Gurav drew attention to the program [email protected], which launched the corporation Sony. This program assumed that the owners of Sony PlayStation 3 consoles will allow their consoles to benefit the scientific community. During the standstill, the prefix, with the approval of its owner, connected to a giant computing array and helped to seek answers to the most important scientific issues. Since then, this program has been curtailed in the framework of the PS3, but the consoles continue to be released to this day.
The thing is that in the heart of the PS3 is an incredibly powerful Cell processor, developed by IBM together with Sony and Toshiba. The processor combines a general-purpose core with several coprocessors, which allow to significantly speed up the processing of multimedia and vector calculations. Theoretical performance of one processor is 218 GFlops, and the clock frequency of its various models varies from 3.2 to 5.6 GHz.
Initially, Gurava's computer consisted of only 16 PS3 consoles, united in one network. But over seven years their number has increased to 200. Given the constantly decreasing cost of the game console due to the optimization of production, the scientist is constantly increasing the power of his supercomputer. The total cost of a supercomputer from consoles is about 75,000 dollars, which is about 10 times cheaper than a similar supercomputer built by traditional methods.
The research of Gurav Khanna focuses on the search and study of gravitational waves, first mentioned in his works by Albert Einstein. Such waves can occur after significant astrophysical events, such as, for example, the collision of two black holes. Since black holes can not be seen in ordinary telescopes, Gurav models their collisions with the help of his supercomputer.
"Science is very expensive pleasure," the researcher points out. - In the scientific world and so not a lot of money, much less in small universities, like ours. Supercomputers allow scientists to gain access to the capabilities that they need so much. "
In 2009, Dr. Khanna published the scientific work "Parallel and distributed computing with the help of PlayStation 3 gaming systems", in which he spoke in detail about his experience with these systems. In the same year he published his scientific work on gravitational waves, which would have been impossible to write without a powerful supercomputer from the game consoles.
By the way, in 2010 Gurav Khanna's work inspired the US Air Force Laboratory so much that they also decided to assemble an inexpensive supercomputer, instead of spending billions of budget money to develop a new one from scratch. Their computer consisted of 1700 consoles PlayStation 3 and cost a very modest by military standards, while allowing for very complex calculations. Military as a gratitude gave the inventive scientist an additional 176 game consoles PS3 for his research.
Now the scientist plans to assemble a new supercomputer that uses powerful video gaming cards as computing nodes. Let's see what he will do this time.
The article is based on materials .
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