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The longest place name is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturi-pukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu - it's in New Zealand
XBox performs parallel tasks
BRITISH SCIENTISTS have worked out that the XBox 360 can be used to power something other than teenage adrenaline rushes.
White coat wearers at the University of Warwick have taken the game console's GPU and made it perform parallel processing functions. Of course the fact that the Xbox 360 is a consumer games console means that the academics were able to perform some impressive number crunching on a very cheap system indeed - especially compared with the cost of using a dedicated clustering system.
According to a BBC report gleaned from a rather niche sounding periodical, the professors built a system that would let them model how electrical signals in the heart deal with damaged cells. That's much better than the usual 'scream at people while playing multi-player games' use that the XBox 360 usually endures.
When it comes to performance the GPU is not quite the full ticket, but the team said it's not all that far off either. Dr Simon Scarle, a researcher on the team, told the Beeb, "You don't quite get the full whammy of a cluster, but its close."
Now he just needs to kill the third zombie, steal its amulet, and blow up a dozen Covenant warships - that should do the trick. µ
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The PS3 can be used as a computing cluster, it's nearly a supercomputer in it's own right, why has the XBOX360 been used for this purpose? when it clearly has far less power.
Maybe it is much easier too program? And the xbox is still cheaper then the PS3.
The PS3 maybe more powerfull, but no one has reach the full capacity of both systems yet... only time will tell.
No need to keep upgrading the cpu every year. How many times has the cpu been upgraded since the xbox came out.
+1
We all know PS3 is way more powerful, and in fact it was on the news some time ago that the PS3 is being used for task other then games. I mean, talk about parallel, a PS3 has 8 cores, and this news arrived just after PS3 started to sell really good and it's price has been cut... seriously how more obvious must it be?
UK must have been really hit bad; abusing PhD students.. tss.. buy a cheap PC + Graphics card and you have the same without the hassle. Better yet: get a machine with 4 NVidia Tesla's!
Surely XBOX doesn't have ECC memory? How can you tell your calculations are actually any good.
The new smaller PS3 doesn't allow for foreign OSes to run. So no more PS3 clusters..
You are wrong.
The Cell processor used in a PS3 is comprised of a Power Processing Element (PPE) and eight co-processors called Synerginistic Processing Elements (SPE).
Only the PPE can be considered a true “core”, the SPE processors require that the PPE feed them with data before they can do anything, since they cannot access main memory themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28microprocessor%29
Regards,
Shad
hmm...
Slightly, kinda sorta...
Anyway this is a GPU related story and nothing to do with the CPU; So reading from the comments IQs suddenly dropped while I was away.
Mine's been doing that for ages. It can make 3 red lights appear at once!
I'm like Yawn on this one. I am surprised they didn't get the 3 rings of death. I mean you make this machine run for 6 hours and you get scared ! Sure thing, they didn't do that test with Xbox360 from the first generation.
I would use a PS3 for any computing task, any day, any times.
See what happened when you post video game console related news? Prepared to be flooded by a bunch of ignorant fanboys comments.
GPU is much harder to program than even Cell, that's a fact. Especially one that is not officially supported by existing API, like xbox360. But it is also more powerful, in very specific tasks. Cell is in the middle, trying to get the best of both world.
Anyway, I think this research is a public stunt that serves no more than just to attract students or research grants. They could have easily used a normal GPU with officially supported programming languages like CUDA, Stream, OpenCL, etc, but they decided to take the long nonsense route.
probably the XBOX development kit was much cheaper than the PS3 development kit that could have been 1 reasons I speculate or perhaps they wanted the Natal API???
They probably used the 360 because the GPU is more powerful than the PS3's and easier to program for than the SPUs on Sony's machine. The question is why they opted for 360s rather than cheap PCs with newer ATI cards.
They used an XBox for the task since it more closely resembles a conventional PC. This would have made the code porting much simpler.
@Shad
You are wrong.
The Cell processor used in a PS3 uses 7 SPEs and 1 PPE. The 8th SPE is disabled for yield issues.
I plan on using mine to crunch my DVD collection into h264. At around 27 times the performance of a Core2Duo, I figured it was worth splashing out the 300 bucks for this purpose (I just managed to get one of the very last ones that run Linux.)
Of course, knowing that Sony was subsidising my purchase was the icing on the cake...
According to C't Magazine issue 20 page 166 then the PS3 is around 3 times faster than a Core i7 for H.264 video encoding using CodecSys CE-10. Alternatively you can use a SpursEngine card with a Cell processor for the PC.
Using Badaboom on a CUDA enabled PC is still the fastest though. Depending on your graphics card it can be up to twice the speed of the PS3 for encoding. And then you can also have your Core i7 for all your other stuff.
Where did all the rabid idiot fanboIs come from. I read this site to get away from these pathetic idiots.
Idolizing a games console is one of the most moronic uses of a human beings time imaginable. I hope when you guys are laying on your death bed you're happy with what you did with your lives.