Astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna has built a supercomputer. Well what's the news in that you may ask? It's what he has used to build it that's of significance to us. Most of us are lucky if we get our hands on one PS3 to cultivate intergalactic peace in a space game. Khanna however 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. The Sony PlayStation 3 has a number of unique features that make it particularly suited for scientific computation. To start with, the PS3 is an open platform, which essentially means that one can run different system software on it, for example, PowerPC Linux. Next, it has a revolutionary processor called the Cell processor which was developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. This processor has a main CPU, called the PPU and several (six for the PS3) special compute engines, called SPUs available for raw computation. Moreover, each SPU performs vector operations, which implies that it can compute on multiple data, in a single step. Finally, its incredibly low cost makes it very attractive as a scientific computing node, which is part of a cluster. In fact, it's highly plausible that the raw computing power per dollar that the PS3 offers is significantly higher than anything else on the market today!

He is using "stock" PS3s for this cluster, with no hardware modifications. They are networked together using an inexpensive netgear gigabit switch. For Linux installation, there are several guides available on the internet. For YDL Linux, consider using the guide by Terrasoft Solutions. For Fedora Core 5/6, For deploying a parallel job on this cluster, they used a code that implements a standard domain decomposition approach, based on message-passing (MPI).

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