PI on a PS3

[Simon Hicks]

Hi all,

Just a crazy thought...has anyone thought of trying PI on a PS3? You can get Linux for the PS3. The spec seems to be quite powerful. The following is some text from Wikipedia....

The PlayStation 3 uses the Sony, Toshiba, IBM-designed Cell microprocessor as its CPU, which is made up of one 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs).[104] The eighth SPE is disabled to improve chip yields.[105][106] Only six of the seven SPEs are accessible to developers as the seventh SPE is reserved by the console's operating system.[106] Graphics processing is handled by the NVIDIA RSX 'Reality Synthesizer', which can output resolutions from 480i/576i SD up to 1080p HD.[98] The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX.[107]

The PS3's hardware has also been used to build supercomputers for high-performance computing.[109] Terra Soft Solutions has a version of Yellow Dog Linux for the PlayStation 3,[110] and sells PS3s with Linux pre-installed,[111] in single units, and 6 and 32 node clusters.[112] In addition, RapidMind is pushing their stream programming package for the PS3.[113] Also, on January 3, 2007, Dr. Frank Mueller, Associate Professor ofComputer science at NCSU, clustered 8 PS3s. Mueller commented that the 256 MB of system RAM is a limitation for this particular application, and is considering attempting to retrofit more RAM. Software includes: Fedora Core 5 Linux ppc64, MPICH2, OpenMP v 2.5, GNU Compiler Collection and CellSDK 1.1.[114][115][116]

All of this is way above my head...but I just thought I'd raise it as a question.

Cheers
Simon

[georg.viehoever]

Hi Simon,

the PS3 is indeed a strong system, but you need to write programs specifically for it to unleash the computing power:

- if you use the PS3 with Linux, most of Linux is running on the PowerPC core (PPE). It is not very fast by current PC/Mac standards.
- the true computing power comes from the Synergistic processing elements (SPEs), which in essence are small vector computers similar to the CRAY computers of the 1980s. They are fast indeed, but need very specific programming techniques.

Juan would need to be quite crazy to try to do this. If anything, using graphics units (GPUs) of current PCs might be an option sooner or later, see http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=1126.0 . But again, this needs a lot of effort.

Georg

[Simon Hicks]

Hi Georg,

I thought it might be a crazy idea, and it sounds like it probably is. Thanks for the explaination though.

Cheers
         Simon

[Cheyenne]

There is a book "Programming the Cell Processor: For Games, Graphics, and Computation" by Matthew Scarpino that gets into all the gory details of what's needed for programming on the PS3.

If you've had experience with multi-processor and auxiliary processor programming it's not *that* bad 

[georg.viehoever]

Hi Cheyenne,

I agree it is not *that* difficult. But the programming techniques you need are fairly different from what you do on more "ordinary" processors (like those from Intel), and it usually takes quite a while to arrive at well optimized code. It's like a Formula 1 Ferrari car: Michael Schumacher knows how to win with them, but most of us would probably mainly complain about the missing air condition...if we survive the first round  .For the moment, I would prefer to stay away from those "exotic" architectures, and better focus efforts on tuning for the more common ones.

Georg

[Cheyenne]

The other issue with the PS3 is the amount of memory.  It's measured in megabytes.

Typically you would have the two GPE's (power architecture) doing all the IO grunt work and feeding the data to the SPE's which would do all the super-dooper math processing.  One way to do the processins is that you string the SPE's together so that each one is doing a particular "step" in the process and it feeds data to the next SPE.  The data communication between the SPE's (and the GPE's) is very fast.  Each SPE has its own local memory for processing with.

[Nocturnal]

Game developers regularly complain that it's hard to port Xbox and PC games to PS3 because of the very different architecture. Software has to be written specifically for that hardware to even attempt to unlock the potential of the system.

While it would be 'interesting' to see PI run on a $300 (new price) PS3 it would be blown away by a $400 PC. I can only imagine the nightmare it must be to recode the general purpose MT architecture of PI into a vector based one. Let's not forget that not *everything* in PI is multi threaded. There is plenty of stuff going on that still benefits from having each core being very fast. So a PS3 port wouldn't be limited to 'just' rewriting the modules but also the rest of the framework would need to be re-done. Ouch. All that work and no benefit. Let's have Juan focus on making PI better on the available 3 platforms.

Sorry to be a wet blanket

[Juan Conejero]

Well, I've been reading this thread with a lot of interest and fun You guys know a lot about hardware and system architectures!

Now the bad news: PI won't run on a PS3. There are two main reasons:

- I don't want to get too old prematurely.

- I don't want to be single again.

[Cheyenne]

The biggest limitation really that I see with the PS3 is the amount of memory (yes -- I do have one, yes -- it's running Linux and yes -- I have the Cell Processing book -- geek that I am)

The *real* question is ... can we have PI for the Android (Google phone) ... ducking and running

[Simon Hicks]

You guys know a lot about hardware and system architectures!

....except me. That's how I can ask daft questions! 

[georg.viehoever]

The *real* question is ... can we have PI for the Android (Google phone) ... ducking and running

Well, I just have to voice the needs of IPhone users here 

Georg