A PlayStation 3 cluster is a distributed system computer composed primarily of PlayStation 3 video game consoles.
Before and during the console's production lifetime, its powerful IBM Cell CPU attracted interest in using multiple, networked PS3s for affordable high-performance computing. [1]
PlayStation 3 clusters have had different configurations. A distributed computing system utilizing PlayStation 3 consoles does not need to meet the strict definition of a computer cluster.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications had already built a cluster based on the PlayStation 2. [2] Terra Soft Solutions released Yellow Dog Linux for the PlayStation 3, [3] and sold PS3s with it pre-installed, [4] in single units and in 8 and 32 node clusters. [5] RapidMind developed a stream programming package for the PS3. [6]
On January 3, 2007, Dr. Frank Mueller, Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, clustered 8 PS3s. Mueller commented that the 256 MB of system RAM is a limitation for this particular application, and considered attempting to retrofit more RAM. Software includes Fedora Core 5 Linux ppc64, MPICH2, OpenMP v2.5, GNU Compiler Collection, and CellSDK 1.1. [7] [8] [9]
In mid-2007, Gaurav Khanna, a professor in the Physics Department of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth independently built a message-passing based cluster using eight PS3s running Fedora Linux, named the PS3 Gravity Grid. It was built with support from Sony Computer Entertainment as the first PS3 cluster with published scientific results. It performed astrophysical simulations of large supermassive black holes capturing smaller compact objects. [10] Khanna claims performance exceeds that of a 100+ Intel Xeon core based traditional Linux cluster, on his simulations. The PS3 Gravity Grid gathered significant media attention through 2007, [11] [12] 2008, [13] [14] 2009, [15] [16] [17] and 2010. [18] [19] Khanna also created an instructional website [20] on building such clusters.
In May 2008, The Laboratory for Cryptological Algorithms, under the direction of Arjen Lenstra at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, built a cluster of 200 consoles which broke a record for the Diffie-Hellman problem on elliptic curves. [21] The cluster operated until 2015.
In November 2010, the Air Force Research Laboratory created a powerful supercomputer, nicknamed the "Condor Cluster", by connecting together 1,760 consoles with 168 GPUs and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of 500 trillion floating-point operations per second (500 TFLOPS). [22] As built, the Condor Cluster was the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world and was used to analyze high definition satellite imagery at a cost of only one tenth that of a traditional supercomputer. [23]
Even a single PS3 can significantly accelerate some computations. Marc Stevens, Arjen K. Lenstra, and Benne de Weger have demonstrated an MD5 brute-force attack in a few hours. In November 2007, they said: "Essentially, a single PlayStation 3 performs like a cluster of 30 PCs at the price of only one". [24]
On March 22, 2007, SCE and Stanford University expanded the Folding@home project to the PS3. [25] Along with thousands of PCs already joined over the Internet, PS3 owners contributed to the study of improper protein folding and associated diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, and cancer. The software was included as part of the 1.6 firmware update on March 22, 2007, and can be set to run manually or automatically when the PS3 is idle through the Cross Media Bar. Processing power from PS3 users greatly contributed, ranked third to Nvidia and AMD GPUs in teraflops. [26] In March 2011, more than one million PS3s had Folding@home installed and more than 27,000 active, for a total of 8.1 petaFLOPS. By comparison, the world's most powerful supercomputer as of November 2010, the Tianhe-IA, has a peak performance of 2.56 petaFLOPS, or 2,566 teraFLOPS. [27]
The Computational Biochemistry and Biophysics Lab in Barcelona has launched a distributed computing project called PS3GRID. This project was expected to run sixteen times faster than on a PC.[ citation needed ]
eHiTS Lightning is the first virtual screening and molecular docking software for the PS3. [28] It was released by SimBioSys. [29] as reported by Bio-IT World in July 2008. [30] This application runs up to 30 times faster on a single PS3 than on a regular single CPU PC, and it runs on PS3 clusters, achieving screening of huge chemical compound libraries in hours or days rather than weeks.
On March 28, 2010, Sony announced it would be disabling the PS3's OtherOS feature, with the v3.21 update, due to security concerns. [31] This update would not affect any existing supercomputing clusters, because they are not connected to PlayStation Network and would not be forced to update. However, it would make replacing the individual consoles that compose the clusters very difficult or impossible, because newer models would be shipped with v3.21. [32] This caused the end of the PS3's common use for clustered computing, though projects like "The Condor" were still being created with older PS3 units, and have come online after that update. [33]
The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on November 11, 2006, in Japan, November 17, 2006, in North America, and March 23, 2007, in Europe and Australia. The PlayStation 3 competed primarily against Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles.
Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) is a discontinued free and open-source operating system for high-performance computing on multi-core processor computer architectures, focusing on GPU systems and computers using the POWER7 processor. The original developer was Terra Soft Solutions, which was acquired by Fixstars in October 2008. Yellow Dog Linux was first released in the spring of 1999 for Apple Macintosh PowerPC-based computers. The most recent version, Yellow Dog Linux 7, was released on August 6, 2012. Yellow Dog Linux lent its name to the popular YUM Linux software updater, derived from YDL's YUP and thus called Yellowdog Updater, Modified.
The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a handheld game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on December 12, 2004, in North America on March 24, 2005, and in PAL regions on September 1, 2005, and is the first handheld installment in the PlayStation line of consoles. As a seventh generation console, the PSP competed with the Nintendo DS.
Cell is a 64-bit multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose PowerPC core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.
Linux for PlayStation 2 is a kit released by Sony Computer Entertainment in 2002 that allows the PlayStation 2 console to be used as a personal computer. It included a Linux-based operating system, a USB keyboard and mouse, a VGA adapter, a PS2 network adapter, and a 40 GB hard disk drive (HDD). An 8 MB memory card is required; it must be formatted during installation, erasing all data previously saved on it, though afterwards the remaining space may be used for savegames. It is strongly recommended that a user of Linux for PlayStation 2 have some basic knowledge of Linux before installing and using it, due to the command-line interface for installation.
Various accessories for the PlayStation 3 video game console have been produced by Sony and third-party companies. These include controllers, audio and video input devices like microphones, video cameras, and cables for better sound and picture quality.
PCSX is a free and open-source, video game console emulator that allows software designed to be used with the Sony PlayStation to run on personal computers. Over the years, development changed hands several times with PCSX-Reloaded (PCSXR) now being the main version. As of 2021, the emulator seems to be no longer under active development. A newer, actively maintained fork of PCSX-Reloaded is PCSX-Redux.
Remote Play is a feature of Sony video game consoles that allow the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 to transmit video and audio output to another device; previously this could only be a PlayStation Portable or PlayStation Vita. In 2014, it was expanded to include the use of PlayStation TV, Xperia smartphones and tablets, and PlayStation Now. In 2016, it was expanded to Microsoft Windows PCs and macOS. In 2019, support for Android and iOS devices was eventually added. Support for remote play of PlayStation 5 games to other devices was added in November 2020 just prior to the new console's launch.
OtherOS is a feature of early versions of the PlayStation 3 video game console, allowing user installed software, such as Linux or FreeBSD. The feature was removed since system firmware update 3.21, released on April 1, 2010.
The PlayStation Eye is a digital camera device, similar to a webcam, for the PlayStation 3. The technology uses computer vision and gesture recognition to process images taken by the camera. This allows players to interact with games using motion and color detection as well as sound through its built-in microphone array. It is the successor to the EyeToy for the PlayStation 2, which was released in 2003.
The PlayStation 3 system software is the updatable firmware and operating system of the PlayStation 3. The base operating system used by Sony for the PlayStation 3 is a fork of both FreeBSD and NetBSD known internally as CellOS or GameOS. It uses XrossMediaBar as its graphical shell.
The seventh generation of home video game consoles began on November 22, 2005, with the release of Microsoft's Xbox 360 home console. This was followed by the release of Sony's PlayStation 3 on November 17, 2006, and Nintendo's Wii on November 19, 2006. Each new console introduced new technologies. The Xbox 360 offered games rendered natively at high-definition video (HD) resolutions, the PlayStation 3 offered HD movie playback via a built-in 3D Blu-ray Disc player, and the Wii focused on integrating controllers with movement sensors as well as joysticks. Some Wii controllers could be moved about to control in-game actions, which enabled players to simulate real-world actions through movement during gameplay. By this generation, video game consoles had become an important part of the global IT infrastructure; it is estimated that video game consoles represented 25% of the world's general-purpose computational power in 2007.
The PlayStation 3 technical specifications describe the various components of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) video game console.
PlayStation is a video gaming brand that consists of five home video game consoles, two handhelds, a media center, and a smartphone, as well as an online service and multiple magazines. The brand is produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment, a division of Sony.
The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on 26 October 2000, in Europe on 24 November 2000, and in Australia on 30 November 2000. It is the successor to the PlayStation (console), as well as the second installment in the PlayStation brand of consoles. As a sixth-generation console, it competed with Nintendo's GameCube, Sega's Dreamcast, and Microsoft's Xbox. It is the best-selling video game console of all time, having sold over 155 million units worldwide, nearly triple the combined sales of the Dreamcast, GameCube, and Xbox.
A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The newest manifestation of cluster computing is cloud computing.
Fixstars Solutions, Inc. is a software and services company specializing in multi-core processors, particularly in Nvidia's GPU and CUDA environment, IBM Power7, and Cell. They also specialize in solid-state drives and currently manufacture the world's largest SATA drives.
The PlayStation 4 technical specifications describe the various hardware components of the PlayStation 4 home video game console group. Multiple versions of this console have been released since the initial launch of the PlayStation 4, including the PlayStation 4 Slim and the PlayStation 4 Pro. Subsequent versions include changes to the technical specifications of the console.
The PlayStation 3 (PS3) video game console has been produced in various models during its life cycle. At launch, the PlayStation 3 was available with either a 20 or 60 GB hard disk drive in the US and Japan, respectively— priced from US$499 to US$599; and with either a 40, 60, or 80 GB hard disk drive in Europe, priced from £299 to £425. Since then, Sony have released two further redesigned models, the "Slim" and "Super Slim" models. As of March 2017, the total number of consoles sold is estimated at 87.4 million.
Homebrew software was first run on the PlayStation 3 by a group of hackers under the name "Team Ice" by exploiting a vulnerability in the game Resistance: Fall of Man. Following various other hacks executed from Linux, Sony removed the ability to install another operating system in the 3.21 firmware update. This event caused backlash among the hacker communities, and eventually the group Fail0verflow found a flaw in the generation of encryption keys which they leveraged to restore the ability to install Linux. George Hotz (Geohot), often misattributed as the genesis of homebrew on the PS3, later created the first homebrew signed using the private "metldr" encryption key which he leaked onto the internet. Leaking the key led to Hotz being sued by Sony. The court case was settled out of court, with the result of George Hotz not being able to further reverse engineer the PS3.
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