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PlayStation 3 Parallel Computing

Ido Tov & Matan Raveh Parallel Processing ( 361-1-3621) January 2014. PlayStation 3 Parallel Computing. Electrical and Computer Engineering DPT. Ben-Gurion University. Introduction. Early 2000’s – Iraqi government bought 1000’s of PS2

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PlayStation 3 Parallel Computing

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  1. Ido Tov & Matan Raveh Parallel Processing (361-1-3621) January 2014 PlayStation 3Parallel Computing Electrical and Computer Engineering DPT. Ben-Gurion University

  2. Introduction • Early 2000’s – Iraqi government bought 1000’s of PS2 • NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) built an 8 and a 32 node PS2 cluster. • Following the PlayStation 3 release: • 2007 – NC State Uni. • 2007 – Dartmouth Uni. (“Gravity Grid”) • 2010 – USAF Research Lab for satellite imagery (500 TFLOPS, 1760 units)

  3. STI Cell Microprocessor • Developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM Originally developed for high performance applications. Each Cell Chip has: • One PowerPC core(PPE) • 8 compute cores (SPEs) • On-chip Memory controller • On-chip I/O • On-chip network to connect them all A PS3 has: • 1 Cell Chips (6 usable SPEs) • 256MB of XDR DRAM Memory • Gigabit Ethernet

  4. PS3 Cell Microprocessor • Power Processing Element (PPE) • Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) • Element Interconnection Bus (EIB) • Memory System • Network Card & Graphics Card

  5. PS3 Cell Microprocessor Power Processing Element (PPE) • The PPE is a 64 bit, "POWER Architecture“ (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC) Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) • An SPE is a self contained vector processor (SIMD) which acts as a co-processor • Each SPE consists of: • 128 x 128 register • Local Store (SRAM) • DMA unit • FP, LD/ST, Permute, Branch Unit (each pipelined)

  6. PlayStation 3 Cluster

  7. PlayStation 3 Cluster • Parallel processing on the PS3 was enabled with the Terra Soft Solutions version of “Yellow Dog” Linux for the PlayStation 3 (2007). • This gave us the ability to work with parallel processing programing tools such as OpenMPI (for use with cluster).

  8. Applications • Bruteforce MD5 (single PS3 cell) • “Gravity Grid” – 2007 by Dr. Khanna, made for simulating black hole’s gravity. • “Folding@Home” – joined research by Sony and Stanford Uni. for protein folding diseases (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's) • Performing the SUMMA algorithm (matrix multiplication)

  9. Advantages and Limitations Advantages • Pricing: • 200GF server ~ 6000$ • 150GF PS3 unit ~ 300$ • Use of Cell Chip technology • Ease of use – hardware and software (Linux and OpenMPI) installation

  10. Advantages and Limitations Limitations • Main memory size: 256MB only (288MB optimal by SUMMA) • Main memory speed / access rate: causing 12.5% efficiency • Gigabit Ethernet – BOTTLENECK (compared to Cell speed) • Double Precision speed slower by factor of 14 than Single Precision • Programming Paradigm

  11. Sad Ending… On March 28th 2010, Sony announced they’re disabling the ability to run other operating systems on Ps3 consoles – eliminating the option of installing Linux OS on PS consoles….    

  12. Sources “PlayStation 3 Cluster” - Wikipedia.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster SCOP3 - A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the PlayStation 3 (Buttari, Luszczek, Kurzak, Dongarra, Bosilca, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 2007) - http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/scop3.pdf Beyond Gaming: Programming the PS3 Cell Architecture for Cost-Effective Parallel Processing (Rabbah, IBM Watson Center, Austria 2007) http://impact.asu.edu/cse520fa07/lec19-PS3-cell-tutorial.pdf

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