Playstation 3 Penguins

PS3 Cluster Supercomputer - step-by-step

2008-12-17T16:58:00.000-08:00

A very interesting link .. a set-by-step guide to setting up a cluster of PS3 as a supercomputer.

http://www.ps3cluster.org/

Update Article on Installing Ubunto on PS3 (with better pictures)

2008-06-06T09:07:00.001-07:00

Cell Processor - Beyond a gaming processor

2008-02-26T21:22:00.000-08:00

Found this link that is very intriguing.

Its suggests that a newer "low power" version of the cell processor is coming out. And the next best industry to make use of it .. will be in medicine. I think Folding@home proved the power of the PS3 in medical research ... but this blogger's suggestion that live medical devices like 3d CAT-scans, live interactive medical imaging .. will be the next big hit.

I thinks that's a great idea! When you think about it .. live 3D interaction is not too different than a hi-resolution FPS (first person shooter). Ignoring, of course, the data stream requirements. Which in this case is what would limit the use of a standard PS3 (digital CAT scans can already generate 6 Gigabytes / sec data streams ... ignoring the whole packet buffering issue .. that out-classes the PS3's 1000Base-T LAN connection).

Now think of the same CAT scanner connected to a custom box with two or three cell processors .. with a 10G network link. Haven't run the numbers .. but I'm pretty sure there's enough horse power there for a custom app to display and modify (read filter) what is being displayed. Imagine now a dynamic disease filter that identifies and highlights on the 3D image ... in real time.

Its a brave new world in interactive medicine!

Update:
Looks like there is plenty of motion in this direction:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34085/118/ IBM Opens first cell research center on college campus.
http://news.soft32.com/mayo-clinic-and-ibm-to-improve-medical-research_5824.html Mayo Clinic and IBM to Improve Medical Research.

Toshiba puts a Cell chip in a laptop?

2008-01-11T09:16:00.000-08:00

CNet is reporting on a "Toshiba Spurs Engine". Apparently they put an IBM Cell processor into a Toshiba Laptop.
Here's the link: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/video/0,139101587,49295004,00.htm

SPU-Medialib has Cell/PS3 optimized programs to accelerate media related content

2007-12-02T12:01:00.000-08:00

Looks like a project called spu-medialib has a collection of media library code optimized for the Cell processor. This should allow MythTV to make full use of the Cell SPU units (the power behind the PS3).

Link is http://wiki.ps2dev.org/ps3:spu-medialib

Gemmell spots someone succesfully running MythTV on the PS3

2007-11-08T20:59:00.000-08:00

Thanks to gemmell for this link: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/299490

It appears someone has classic MythTV running on the PS3. It will be interesting to see if they get reliable HD decoding with out using the cell processors. Or, perhaps they found a port of the libmpeg for the cell.

Terra Soft uses PS3 for a Stereo Vision Setup in DARPA's Urban Challange

2007-10-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

Yet another awesome use of PS3 cells. Terra Soft has built a stereo vision system based on the PS3.
Slashdot is reporting it was used in Axion Racing's entry to the DARPA Urban Challenge.

Links:
Terr Soft: http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/showcase/cellebration/axion/tss.shtml
Slashdot Discussion: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/30/161252
DARPA urban challenge: http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/

Need Help .. What else should be posted?

2007-07-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

Since there doesn't appear to be much work on porting mpeg libraries to the cell processor in Linux (to make use of the massive parallel processors) ... What else should I write about?

Have a good post or link you want to see here? Just post it as a comment and I will add the really good ones as new posts.

--Thanks,
PS3Penguin

Sony has launched and "Official" PS Blog

2007-06-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

It appears to cover the entire "Play Station family"
http://blog.us.playstation.com/

A bunch of links about Compiling code for the PS3 / Cell

2007-05-24T22:50:00.000-07:00

Haven't had much time to go through these yet .. but I wanted to make sure they got captured.
Here are some pages that have links to either compilers, compiler extensions or SDKs for the PS3 or Cell processor.

Linux devices - http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5311012332.html
Sony Computer - http://cell.scei.co.jp/e_download.html
Game Tomorrow - http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/2005/11/09/cell-sdk-now-available-for-download/
IBM - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

StreamIt - Not to be out done .. MIT has a new language focused on Multicore computing

2007-05-24T22:41:00.001-07:00

As MIT puts it StreamIt
"is a programming language and a compilation infrastructure, specifically engineered for modern streaming systems. It is designed to facilitate the programming of large streaming applications ..."

http://cag.csail.mit.edu/streamit/

Technology Review has a good summary at http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18597/

IBM Octopiler -- A new compiler aid to port to Cell processing?

2007-05-24T22:36:00.001-07:00

It appears IBM has a new aid to help develop more applications that make use of the Cell processor.

From the following link:
"Our aim is to automatically generate high quality code taking advantage of the wide range of heterogeneous parallelism for Scale-Up and Scale-Out architectures. We propose "single source" compiler solutions for heterogeneous memory and computational subsystems using automatically-partitioned code and data, as well as software-managed cache for irregular data accesses. We exploit parallelism at all levels, including data and task level parallelism as well as SIMD parallelism."

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.index.html?Open&printable

Slashdot reports: 250,000 PS3s Folding@Home

2007-04-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

Slashdot has an interesting post about how the PS3 has helped Folding@home reach 250,000 users with over 700 terraflops of processing power. Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off the floor .... wow .. thats a lot of processing power.

Check it out at http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/04/25/184201.shtml

Shameless PS3 Promotion Video

2007-04-04T21:16:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the shameless promotion video .. but I LOVE how the PR guy describes the unique quality of the PS3 .. and wacthing the rain drop demo is pretty cool too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwCDhMJ6-r4

.. this one is pretty good too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sknTNbM8vTo

Folding@Home on the PS3

2007-03-23T14:30:00.000-07:00

Check out the stats for the PS3 doing the Folding@Home project. Wow ..

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

This is what I saw at 2:30pm on March 23, 2007

OS Type	Current TFLOPS*	Active CPUs	Total CPUs
Windows	151	159198	1624934
Mac OS X/PowerPC	7	8716	95341
Mac OS X/Intel	8	2716	7216
Linux	42	24971	215703
GPU	41	700	2188
PLAYSTATION®3	367	14971	15914
Total	616	211272	1961296

Riding The Multi-core Revolution Demo

2007-03-23T14:15:00.000-07:00

Here is a long .. but very interesting presentation called "Riding the Multi-core Revolution Demo"
It discusses the trends of Parallel processing .. and multi core computing and the effects on software development.

Covered in the demo is a discussion of GPU use for specialized software computation (other than graphics)
It also mentions IBM's Cell processor use of specialized multi-cores .. talking about how to write scalable programs to make use of it.

about 32 mins into the Demo .. is the "16,000" chicken demo referenced earlier in the blog.
http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/Riding%2520The%2520Multi-core%2520Revolution.html

Reduce your memory footprint: IBM article

2007-02-27T20:26:00.000-08:00

While reading "Geek Patrol" I ran across this relevant link titled "How to reduce your memory footprint" http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linux-memory.html.

Geek Patrol Performance: PS3 vs. Mac G5

2007-02-27T20:19:00.000-08:00

The "Geek Patrol" website has a pretty interesting comparison between the Mac G5 and the PS3.

Keep in mind .. the PS3 is not running with any "cell" optimizations .. so its really a good benchmark to see how the "stripped down" power pc in the PS3 compares to a Mac version.

http://www.geekpatrol.ca/2006/11/playstation-3-performance/

48 Simultaneous SDTV streams decoded by Cell Processor

2007-02-05T12:20:00.000-08:00

Finally found a reference to an old (2005) trade show demonstration .. where the cell processor decoded 48 SDTV MPEG-2 streams simultaneously! No I don't think this was done on a PS3 .. but it shows the power of the cell processor. HDTV is roughly 4 SDTV streams ... so you could infer 12 HDTV streams (maybe 10 to be safe) ... now thats PIP!

From the article:
"Toshiba demonstrated that its Cell microprocessor, jointly developed with the Sony Group and IBM Corp., can simultaneously decode 48 SDTV format MPEG-2 streams. At the COOL Chips VIII event held in Yokohama from April 20 to 22, 2005, the company showed a film demonstrating the decoding process"

Here is the article link: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20050425/104149/

Linux Kernel 2.6.20 to add Playstation 3 support

2007-01-31T08:49:00.000-08:00

It appears the 2.6.20 version of the Linux kernel about to be release will include a lot of PS3 enhancements.

According to this page the changes are made by Sony engineers.

Found from a this Slashdot post.
Here is a softpedia article on it.

Ah .. The power of cells

2007-01-30T17:50:00.000-08:00

Found this great post off Slashdot.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197001130

Down in the article they talk about a new Petaflop supercomputer that IBM is building..
Read this quote and ask "Does this architecture sound familiar?"

"Roadrunner is the first rendering of a hybrid computing architecture: multiple heterogeneous cores with a multitier memory hierarchy. It's also built entirely out of commodity parts: AMD Opteron-based servers, Cell BE-based accelerators and Infiniband interconnect. Standard processing (e.g., file system I/O) will be handled by Opteron processors, while more mathematically and CPU-intensive elements will be directed to the Cell BE processors."

Did you catch the pool of cell processors directed by a master (and separate standard) processor?

I guess that makes the PS3 a "proof of concept" super-computer.

"How Stuff Works" on the PS3

2007-01-20T11:39:00.000-08:00

Found a nice page on how the PS3 works at "How Stuff Works".
Its http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/playstation-three.htm.

It has some nice pictures of the processor itself, with neat eye candy when discussing the PS3 GPU RSX "Reality Synthesize". You should check it out .. if nothing else but to seen the impressive graphics.

Keep in mind that until Sony or a third party creates libraries optimized for the cell (and drivers for the GPU) ... the Linux side of life won't be all that impressive. This is why I believe the currently working MythTV frontends on PS3 are a little slow / choppy. Frame buffering .. although useful as an easy first port .. is hardly efficient.

USB TV Tuner + PS3 + MythTV

2007-01-18T09:38:00.000-08:00

Red Marine gave me another great link
http://ps3.qj.net/MythTV-on-your-PS3/pg/49/aid/79651

Quoted Text from PS3.QJ.NET

"It was only a matter of time before someone tried a USB TV Tuner and successfully put together a working set of drivers for it. And that someone would be Takeshi Yaegashi who has been successful in patching the Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U's Linux drivers to work properly on the PS3. The problem was that the original GO7007 Video4Linux2 drivers didn't run properly on a 32bit userland/64bit kernel environment.

The released patches will patch the GO7007 Video4Linux2 drivers and the Addon CD to improve compatibility with the said environment, which is common on all PS3 Linux distros. What you'll have to do is patch the drivers, then patch the Addon CD file and finally compile the kernel given in the Addon CD. If this sounds a bit difficult, you can wait for distros to appear with this patches built in.

I would expect Gentoo to be the first with the patches, seeing how they're already thinking of including MythTV on the Gentoo Live CD. If you do understand the consequences and want to go ahead with this, download the patches, the new Addon CD, patch both of them, and then use the new customised kernel with your distro. Expect a thorough how-to soon!"

One sighting of a user that has MythTV front+backend on PS3

2007-01-08T23:04:00.000-08:00

MythTv's Wiki has a comment in the "Choosing Frontend Hardware" section that says that MythTV 0.20 does work on PS3 (frontend and backend).

However there is a catch ... you have to run the video in frame buffer mode .. apparently Sony currently blocks Linux from accessing the video card directly ... hopefully Sony will provide a better API.