December 28, 2009 • 25 mins
The US air force has purchased thousands of Playstation 3 units in order to build a supercomputer -- but how? Tune in as Jonathan and Chris examine the strategy behind this unorthodox project in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
text stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there, everybody,
and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
and I am the tech editor here at how stuff
(00:21):
works dot Com. Sitting across from me, as he always does,
is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, guys, we're having
a bit of an identity crisis today. Who is Yeah, so, um,
we are going to talk about some some very strange
combinations of things actually, uh one that you might not
(00:42):
expect gaming and super computing, super super computing. Yeah. This
actually comes a courtesy of a little listener text message Liz,
queue something up, will you? This text message comes from
Tim who says, what's up with the U. S. Army
buying p S three's for a parallel supercomputer cloud system? Question? Mark? Well, Tim,
(01:07):
first of all, it's not the U. S. Army, it's
the US Air Force. And it wasn't twenty two hundred
p S three's It was actually twenty five hundred. But uh, yeah,
we get the point of the question here, which is
what is up with buying p S three's and how
does that make a supercomputer? It all boils down to
the PlayStation three's processor, which is a cell processor. Yes,
(01:31):
this is a custom chip. UM actually spent quite a
lot of money in in development and it was under
development by a joint venture of three companies. In addition
to Sony, IBM and Toshiba were both involved with this
with this chips manufacturer. And uh, it's a pretty interesting device.
It's what gives the p S three it's mph and uh,
(01:54):
you know, allows it to do what it can do.
It can crunch lots and lots of numbers, right, and
so let's uh, let's just do a quick overview of
what a processor does and then we talk about why
the the cell processor is slightly different. So, in general,
a processor's job is to take a uh information, So
it's taking data and executing any sort of function upon
(02:18):
that data to get a result. So there are two
different lines of data going into a processor at any
one time. There's the source information and then there are
there the the the functions, the various code that comes
in and says, all right, add these numbers together, or
divide this number, or find the uh the largest two
(02:38):
prime integers of this number. Um. And so that's what
a processor does, is it It It executes the command
upon the data and then gives the result. Uh. So
that's the basic function of a processor. Now the cell
processor is a little different. It's it's kind of a
specialized processor and uh it has a cup of different
(03:00):
elements to it that allow it to behave in a
slightly different way. Um. In a way, it actually kind
of acts like multiple computers working together on a single problem.
It's just it's all been consolidated onto a single processor chip. Now,
this processor chip has a power processor element or p
p E. The power processor elements job is kind of
(03:24):
like a manager at uh in a in an office,
all right. The manager's job is they take in an
assignment and then they give that they delegate that assignment
to an employee complete all right, and then uh that
employee would be represented by a synergistic processor element or SPE.
Now the PS three cell processors have a one PPE
(03:47):
and seven SPEs. So the PPE takes the problem, divides
it up into individual tasks, and gives each task to
an SPE. Each SPE is able to work as its
own processor, with all of them working together in concert.
You have a very powerful chip because they are all.
(04:08):
That means all seven of these can work towards solving
each individual problem, which ultimately will solve a much larger problem.
Uh in in a fraction of the time of what
would take a similarly powerful single core processor. Okay, So
the other way that the analogy I used I use
this on an episode of Tech Stuff Live not too
(04:29):
long ago. But imagine that you have two rooms. Inside
one room, you've got a mathematician genius, someone who can
take a math problem and solve it. Uh It doesn't
matter how complex you make it. Eventually, sooner or later,
this genius will figure it out. In a second room,
you have a room full of smart people who are
(04:51):
good at math. But they are not mathematicians. They are
not geniuses. They're just they're diligent and they work hard
and they can get the right answer. It just usually
takes them a little bit longer than it would the
genius in the other room. Now, let's say you've got
a math problem. The math problem is a really really
long problem that can be broken down into several steps,
And you give the math problem to the genius, and
(05:13):
you give the math problem to the room full of
smart people. The smart people can break that problem up
into lots of smaller problems, and each person is working
on a section of it, and then ultimately they can
put all their answers together and solve it faster than
the genius can. However, if you have a big problem
that cannot be broken down, the genius is going to
(05:36):
be able to work through that problem faster because no
matter how you, how how much the smart people in
the other room look at it, they can't break that
problem into smaller pieces to solve each on their own.
So they just have to work on it and get
through the problem. That they're not gonna be any faster
than the other guy in the other room. So that's
that's kind of a comparison of a cell processor versus
(05:58):
a very powerful, uh regular microprocessor. Uh. It all depends
on the kind of information you feed into it. If
it's the kind of information that can be broken down
into smaller problems, you're set. You're going to be able
to solve that in in no time flat, relatively speaking,
because you can do something that's called parallel processing. All
(06:19):
the processors are working in parallel. Awesome. Wow, I'm I'm
already wiped out. We haven't even gotten to the part
about the US Air Force. Now, the Air Force is
not actually they're not. It's not the first organization to
use PS three's as a supercomputer. Yeah. As a matter
of fact, um Sony was trying to illustrate this as
(06:42):
far back as two thousand six. Um they have been
uh promoting the idea that the cell processor is capable
of handling advanced computing UM basically as an if you will,
as sort of a marketing effort, although sort of an
unusual one by you know, I guess most aiming console standards,
(07:02):
but it's it's basically a marketing effort to show, look,
this is this processor is so advanced it can handle
serious computing stuff, not just handle your games. It's not
just a Blu ray player. It really is a super
heavy duty monster of a chip. And um, they actually
have been very uh cooperative with people who are are
(07:23):
trying to build them into and network them together to
make a super computer as um as certain uh researcher
did up in the Northeastern United States. Are you familiar
with this person? This is the astrophysicist Dr Garov Kana. Yes.
Dr Kanna, who who networked eight PlayStation three's together originally
(07:43):
in order to solve problems relating to gravitational fields and
things of that nature. Yeah, he called it his gravity
grid according to the research that I used. UM. And basically,
what he wanted to do was to find out, uh,
what would happen if a supermassive black ol swallows a star,
And so he wanted he really needed massive amounts of
(08:05):
computing ability to do that, and he had been spending
money that he he was receiving as grants from the
National Science Foundation UM to distribute his project out to supercomputers,
but that was costing about five thousand dollars a pop.
And UM, he realized that he could do this more
affordably with the processors inside a PlayStation three if he
(08:26):
networked them together and also installed Lennox. That's an important
element of this is that they Sony actually allows people
to install and an open source operating system onto the
p S three if they want to. It's it's actually allowed. Um,
there's no barrier in place, which I gotta say is
really weird for Sony. I mean, Sony is not known
(08:48):
for being the most open platform kind of company, but um, yeah,
by installing lenox and creating a cluster of these PS three's.
You have this very power full processing machine. What that
that is? Uh, that's one illustration of how behind this
project Sony is. But I haven't a more even uh
(09:10):
vivid thing because see Dr Kano figured it would take
about to buy the PlayStation three and this was you know,
a couple of years ago. They were still more they
were more expensive than since then. Um, but he was
able to talk Sony. He explained to Sony what he
wanted to do, and Sony Sony donated the eight machines
that he needed to create his gravity grid. So they
(09:33):
were absolutely saying yeah and are absolutely so, um, you
know they were. They were totally behind it, and it
made some noise at the time, which was good because
at the time Sony was having some difficulties selling them
because they were very expensive. And so when you know,
I was talking earlier about the the one PPE handing
(09:54):
out the the the individual jobs to the sp s.
The same thing can be said. If you Clu suster
these these devices together, you just you become you create
an even larger group. So it's like a group of
managers and a group of employees and so uh, you
effectively increase the processing ability of this these machines, you know,
(10:15):
by however many you managed to network together, and you
can network lots of these together. You don't. It doesn't
have to just be eight. That was the size of
the cluster that um Dr Khanna decided to to go with.
But uh, and it admit the processing needs that you
had at the time. The US Air Force is doing
a similar project. You know, we were talking abouts threes.
(10:39):
It's actually closer to undred. They already had over three
hundred uh already set aside for supercomputing. But it's the
same sort of concept is linking these together. You install
Linux on them, you create clusters, and using these clusters
you can solve really complex problems and and and parallel problems. Again,
(11:02):
once again we have to differentiate. Um has to be
a complex parallel problem for these clusters to actually be effective.
This is very similar in a way to what quantum
computing promises us. You may remember we talked about quantum
computing in a previous podcast. Actually we may have talked
about a couple of times. But quantum computers use cubits
(11:23):
rather than just regular bits, and a cubit can be
a zero or a one, or theoretically anything in between
at the same time, so you are able to do
multiple You're able to execute multiple processes all at once
because these cubits are fulfilling all possibilities at the same time.
The difference between quantum computers and networking a bunch of
(11:44):
p S three's together is the results from a quantum
computer are going to be generated in probabilities, so you
get you'll get maybe a range of potential answers with
a percentage of how likely each one is correct, so
you'll never be certain that the answer that has the
highest percentage, you know, the highest probability of being correct,
(12:06):
is in fact the really correct one, which is kind
of weird, but that's quantum for you. Yeah, probably, yeah. Um.
You know it's funny too because, just as an aside,
every time somebody says cubits, I think of the the
length measurements, not which is cub i T you're thinking
(12:27):
about building an arc, Well, yeah, everybody thinks of the arc,
probably because of the Bill Cosby bit. What the hell
is a cubit? Yeah, but now these are q bits, Yeah,
which is an entirely different. Animals say a distant cousin
to q Bert. Right. UM. That amazes me. That's why
(12:47):
I bring up Cubert as often as possible. The Air
Force is actually going to be using this cluster to
test a way of processing multiple radar images. Basically, they
want to build them into fire resolution versions of those
images UM, and other projects including high definition video processing. UM.
(13:08):
You know, pretty heavy stuff. UM. But you know it
requires that much processing power and it actually apparently is
going to be handled at the Air Force Reach Research
Laboratories Information Center in Rome, New York. So. UM, it's
a very very specialized unit. It sounds like from the
from the descriptions I've read, UM. But what's really interesting
(13:31):
is you can do this yourself if you are. I
was wondering if we were going to go into the
how too, because this is this gets kind of complicated. No,
I wasn't going to go in depth into the how to,
but I was going to point out that uh Dr
Khanna and another UM, the U Mass Dartmouth Principal investigator H.
Chris Poulin, have a guide available to It's free, it's
(13:53):
open source. All you need to do is go to
PS three cluster dot org and you can find out
how to build your on PlayStation three uh cluster computer,
and they even tell you how you can still play
games on it, although it does require a special boot
system in order to boot back into the regular proprietary
PS three operating system, which is very very cool. Yeah,
(14:15):
so in general, I can run through like the high
level steps because we can't really get into the details.
It's really really complicated. Well, yeah, I'm not sure that
anybody is going to take the podcast and yeah, but
just just so you kind of get an idea of
what goes into this is that you you have to
be able to uh get a particular they they recommend
(14:35):
a specific Linux distribution that you then uh you uh
image onto a DVD and you use that as a
part of what you're going to do for the the
operating system for the Sony PS three. You also have
to have a USB memory stick to get a special
boot command on that um uh you put the image
(14:55):
of that on there. They actually host that file on
the site itself, and you using these together, you can
go into a Sony PlayStation three menu and there's actually
a choice to um switch the operating system to other
So you I mean, it's built in you can change
it that way. I mean that shows you that Sony
(15:17):
was thinking ahead and was being very accommodating to this
kind of hacking. Um, and we're using hacking in the uh,
not not in the malicious sense, but in the hey,
let's make this thing that does this particular task do
something totally unrelated, which is really cool. Let's take it
apart and see what else we can make it. So
(15:38):
you has they have steps for installing Linux onto the machine,
which is actually it's a multi step process, um and
it it might be a little intimidating, but if you
actually follow the instructions that are on the website, they're
very comprehensive and they you know you don't. It's one
of those things where it's better if you do know everything,
(15:58):
like the reasons why you are are going through these steps,
but it's not necessary because they tell you what to
do anyway, so you could just blindly follow the steps
and as long as you do that, you should be
all right. And uh. After you've installed Lenox, it's time
to create something called the message passing interface, which is
that's the way that it it processes information and networks information.
(16:23):
And you also have to get the uh software Developer Kit,
so that you can actually make it do whatever it
is that you plan on having it do, whether that's
search for intelligent life or plot thermonuclear war. I mean,
it's really up to you basically at that point, it's
just a tool. It's not that you know, it's not
gonna run your games better, let me put it that way.
(16:44):
You're not gonna suddenly see and improve performance from your
p S three as far as gaming is concerned. But
you can use it as a very powerful computer. And
if you have a particular project that requires parallel processing
and that's a lot of ps. Yeah, that thing we've
got a pop filed are here. Um. But if you
if you happen to have that that need, this could
(17:05):
be a resource for you, especially now that the prices dropped. Um.
And it's that's it's kind of interesting too that it's
gained so much traction as an idea to use the
PlayStation three as a model for the or and I
guess a unit to be built into a cluster UM.
The Cluster Workshop project, the one that we're just talking about,
is as now partially funded by the National Science Foundation. UM.
(17:29):
So it's you know, it's received that level of support
in the scientific community. So um, and from what I
could tell, it looks like a lot of people have
adopted the idea. Um, it's just one of those things
where when the military goes out and buys a whole
lot of game consoles and networked into a cluster computer.
It's it's it makes headlines because it's an interesting story.
(17:50):
Well yeah, and when you think about it, having to
submit that budget request up the chain of command to
the point where you know ultimately it's going to go
to some sort of politicians, it can be a challenge
to explain to someone not it's not not I don't
want to use the word savvy, but not particularly informed
(18:12):
about the possibility of of networking these devices together in
order to make an actual computer. Uh. You know, on
the surface, you just say, why the heck do you
want video game consoles? Uh? So, I mean that would
definitely be a challenge. I would not want to be
the guy who has to explain, especially if if I
were in a chain of command situation, I might not
(18:32):
even understand it. You know, it might be like three
people below me have have that information and then I'm
kind of stuck. But that is It is a nice
interesting way to solve the problem because supercomputers are not
just expensive. I mean, not all research facilities purchase supercomputers.
(18:52):
In fact, most don't. Most end up essentially, um not
not renting time, but getting having to I'm granted to
them to use a supercomputer, either through grant money or
sometimes the supercomputer, uh resource has a quota to meet
of a certain number of hours of processing time they
(19:13):
have to dedicate to research projects. But you've got you've
got more projects, and you have supercomputers, so you know
that time becomes a precious commodity. And if you if
you aren't able to book that time when your research
project is active, then it could be really hard to
keep that project going long enough for you to be
able to get the access. So this is a really
(19:34):
it's a viable alternative. Yeah. Yeah, And another nice thing
too is that, you know, it's one of the things
that keeps Google's data centers running. Mean, they use thousands
and thousands of computers as servers. You know, if one
of them goes down, there's some redundancy. So I would
assume although I you know, it's just one of those
things that just came to me I haven't researched it,
but I would assume if one of the PlayStations, um,
(19:57):
you know, gives up the ghost, then you could pull
it out and you know, put another machine in there
far more affordably than you could if you're a supercomputer,
you know, your crazy definitely, definitely, because you're talking about
you know, off the shelf components versus sometimes uh very
specific um unique parts. I mean, some of these supercomputers
(20:19):
are running on chips that you know, they essentially come
out of the lab and go into a supercomputer, so
they're not even at the mass production phase necessarily for
some of these chips, whereas with the p S three
you just go to best Buy or you know something
and just pick one off the shelf and go and
you buy it and you're done. You have to go
back and you you know, you have to of course
install the operating system and and and attach it to
(20:41):
your cluster part of the cluster. It's not like it's
just plug in play. But it's a lot easier than
if you suddenly had your supercomputer go oopsie on you. Yeah,
not that I've ever heard of a PlayStation three having
that kind of a problem. Now that's more of an
Xbox three sixty kind of thing. See, now people are
gonna write to me and say that I hate the
Xbox three six, despite the fact that I am an
(21:01):
avid Xbox fan. But come on, guys, that red ring
of death. Seriously. Oh you know, I I wouldn't mind having.
I don't own either one, and I would like at
PlayStation three and an Xbox reason so would I put
it on my Amazon wish list, And no one has
picked it up yet. I keep checking. Well, you know,
look in your stocking. We'll see what we can do.
(21:23):
And I have been gaining a lot of weight. My
stocking has been getting larger, Leon is getting larger. Well,
I guess, uh, that's a good discussion about the p
S three supercomputer connection. Um, that was a great question, Tim.
He actually he actually, Although I said it was a
listener text message, he sent his request via phone, which
a lot of you have been doing. And it just
(21:43):
shows that our listeners are super cool smartphone users, which
is awesome. Um. Well, I guess that wraps up that discussion,
but it does lead us to a little listener mail.
This listener mail comes from Immanual Emmanuel says, Hey, they're
imitating Jonathan because you guys are awesome. Thank you. You
(22:06):
guys mentioned that NATAL uses only gestures and it is
unsure of whether it will be too much of a
leap in technology. However, one thing you forgot to mention
is that NATAL can actually scan physical objects, which then
allows you to use real world objects in your games.
This can range from skateboards, tennis rackets, to an air
soft gun for first person shoots, etcetera. In my humble opinion,
(22:28):
the developers are really in control of whether or not
their game will implement some sort of physical object. The
only way to find out is to wait until the
release date. We shall see. I'm Emmanuel from Bermuda and
this is my okay. Now, this was a request from Immanual.
So anyone who gets annoyed by me yelling into the microphone,
this is your opportunity. Turned down the volume now, okay,
(22:50):
I'm going to count to three, and after that I'm
gonna fulfill Emmanual's requests. Remember this is a manual asking
for this, so please turn down your volume one, two, three.
Listener Maid in the tone that you used to use
(23:12):
because it always managed to make me laugh. Thanks Emmanuel,
I hope you guys were able to turn your volume
down in time. Don't send me iTunes reviews and say
that you hated it. I gave you plenty of opportunity
that time, guys. You know, I have to say it's
it's funny because, um, both sides are pretty vocal about
whether they liked or hated that. Yeah, we get email
(23:32):
all the time about people who say, thank you for
changing that, that was irritating, or I really miss the
way you used to say listener mail. And then we
still get reviews on iTunes that say I hate how
he yells into the microphone, Like I haven't done that
for like three months anyway, So I guess they're just
listening to all the old episodes. Thanks a lot, Emanuel.
(23:52):
That is a good point. Yes, Natal can scan objects
like like a skateboard. So it's kind of similar to
the Tony Hawk Ride game that came mount where you
have a very special controller that's in the shape of
a skateboard. Use that as a controller. Why are you
looking at me like that? Nothing? So anyway, you can
scan like a board and use it as if it
were one of those controllers. Now, granted the board you
(24:14):
scan would just be a normal board. It wouldn't even
have any controls in it or anything. It's an't all
scanning it and then interpreting that. So when I said
that you would have to use like just your empty
hand for like a lightsaber game, I totally forgot. No,
you don't necessarily have to do that. It may allow
you to scan an object and use that as the
hilt of a lightsaber, which could then help you defeat
(24:37):
the forces of evil, or if you are like me,
make everyone join the empire. I have a plus three
slice of pizza. Fear me. Okay, now you're mixing genres
and and different kinds of games. I'm gonna have to
close this out. If any of you would like to
send us mail, our address is tex Stuff at how
(24:58):
stuff works dot com. Remember we got a live show,
tech Stuff Live every Tuesday one pm Eastern. You can
find a link to that through the blogs and the
blog links are on how stuff works dot com on
the right hand side and Crispy and I will talk
to you again really soon. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
(25:20):
and be sure to check out the new tech stuff
blog now on the house, Stuff Works homepage, brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,
are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
text stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there, everybody,
and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette
and I am the tech editor here at how stuff
(00:21):
works dot Com. Sitting across from me, as he always does,
is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, guys, we're having
a bit of an identity crisis today. Who is Yeah, so, um,
we are going to talk about some some very strange
combinations of things actually, uh one that you might not
(00:42):
expect gaming and super computing, super super computing. Yeah. This
actually comes a courtesy of a little listener text message Liz,
queue something up, will you? This text message comes from
Tim who says, what's up with the U. S. Army
buying p S three's for a parallel supercomputer cloud system? Question? Mark? Well, Tim,
(01:07):
first of all, it's not the U. S. Army, it's
the US Air Force. And it wasn't twenty two hundred
p S three's It was actually twenty five hundred. But uh, yeah,
we get the point of the question here, which is
what is up with buying p S three's and how
does that make a supercomputer? It all boils down to
the PlayStation three's processor, which is a cell processor. Yes,
(01:31):
this is a custom chip. UM actually spent quite a
lot of money in in development and it was under
development by a joint venture of three companies. In addition
to Sony, IBM and Toshiba were both involved with this
with this chips manufacturer. And uh, it's a pretty interesting device.
It's what gives the p S three it's mph and uh,
(01:54):
you know, allows it to do what it can do.
It can crunch lots and lots of numbers, right, and
so let's uh, let's just do a quick overview of
what a processor does and then we talk about why
the the cell processor is slightly different. So, in general,
a processor's job is to take a uh information, So
it's taking data and executing any sort of function upon
(02:18):
that data to get a result. So there are two
different lines of data going into a processor at any
one time. There's the source information and then there are
there the the the functions, the various code that comes
in and says, all right, add these numbers together, or
divide this number, or find the uh the largest two
(02:38):
prime integers of this number. Um. And so that's what
a processor does, is it It It executes the command
upon the data and then gives the result. Uh. So
that's the basic function of a processor. Now the cell
processor is a little different. It's it's kind of a
specialized processor and uh it has a cup of different
(03:00):
elements to it that allow it to behave in a
slightly different way. Um. In a way, it actually kind
of acts like multiple computers working together on a single problem.
It's just it's all been consolidated onto a single processor chip. Now,
this processor chip has a power processor element or p
p E. The power processor elements job is kind of
(03:24):
like a manager at uh in a in an office,
all right. The manager's job is they take in an
assignment and then they give that they delegate that assignment
to an employee complete all right, and then uh that
employee would be represented by a synergistic processor element or SPE.
Now the PS three cell processors have a one PPE
(03:47):
and seven SPEs. So the PPE takes the problem, divides
it up into individual tasks, and gives each task to
an SPE. Each SPE is able to work as its
own processor, with all of them working together in concert.
You have a very powerful chip because they are all.
(04:08):
That means all seven of these can work towards solving
each individual problem, which ultimately will solve a much larger problem.
Uh in in a fraction of the time of what
would take a similarly powerful single core processor. Okay, So
the other way that the analogy I used I use
this on an episode of Tech Stuff Live not too
(04:29):
long ago. But imagine that you have two rooms. Inside
one room, you've got a mathematician genius, someone who can
take a math problem and solve it. Uh It doesn't
matter how complex you make it. Eventually, sooner or later,
this genius will figure it out. In a second room,
you have a room full of smart people who are
(04:51):
good at math. But they are not mathematicians. They are
not geniuses. They're just they're diligent and they work hard
and they can get the right answer. It just usually
takes them a little bit longer than it would the
genius in the other room. Now, let's say you've got
a math problem. The math problem is a really really
long problem that can be broken down into several steps,
And you give the math problem to the genius, and
(05:13):
you give the math problem to the room full of
smart people. The smart people can break that problem up
into lots of smaller problems, and each person is working
on a section of it, and then ultimately they can
put all their answers together and solve it faster than
the genius can. However, if you have a big problem
that cannot be broken down, the genius is going to
(05:36):
be able to work through that problem faster because no
matter how you, how how much the smart people in
the other room look at it, they can't break that
problem into smaller pieces to solve each on their own.
So they just have to work on it and get
through the problem. That they're not gonna be any faster
than the other guy in the other room. So that's
that's kind of a comparison of a cell processor versus
(05:58):
a very powerful, uh regular microprocessor. Uh. It all depends
on the kind of information you feed into it. If
it's the kind of information that can be broken down
into smaller problems, you're set. You're going to be able
to solve that in in no time flat, relatively speaking,
because you can do something that's called parallel processing. All
(06:19):
the processors are working in parallel. Awesome. Wow, I'm I'm
already wiped out. We haven't even gotten to the part
about the US Air Force. Now, the Air Force is
not actually they're not. It's not the first organization to
use PS three's as a supercomputer. Yeah. As a matter
of fact, um Sony was trying to illustrate this as
(06:42):
far back as two thousand six. Um they have been
uh promoting the idea that the cell processor is capable
of handling advanced computing UM basically as an if you will,
as sort of a marketing effort, although sort of an
unusual one by you know, I guess most aiming console standards,
(07:02):
but it's it's basically a marketing effort to show, look,
this is this processor is so advanced it can handle
serious computing stuff, not just handle your games. It's not
just a Blu ray player. It really is a super
heavy duty monster of a chip. And um, they actually
have been very uh cooperative with people who are are
(07:23):
trying to build them into and network them together to
make a super computer as um as certain uh researcher
did up in the Northeastern United States. Are you familiar
with this person? This is the astrophysicist Dr Garov Kana. Yes.
Dr Kanna, who who networked eight PlayStation three's together originally
(07:43):
in order to solve problems relating to gravitational fields and
things of that nature. Yeah, he called it his gravity
grid according to the research that I used. UM. And basically,
what he wanted to do was to find out, uh,
what would happen if a supermassive black ol swallows a star,
And so he wanted he really needed massive amounts of
(08:05):
computing ability to do that, and he had been spending
money that he he was receiving as grants from the
National Science Foundation UM to distribute his project out to supercomputers,
but that was costing about five thousand dollars a pop.
And UM, he realized that he could do this more
affordably with the processors inside a PlayStation three if he
(08:26):
networked them together and also installed Lennox. That's an important
element of this is that they Sony actually allows people
to install and an open source operating system onto the
p S three if they want to. It's it's actually allowed. Um,
there's no barrier in place, which I gotta say is
really weird for Sony. I mean, Sony is not known
(08:48):
for being the most open platform kind of company, but um, yeah,
by installing lenox and creating a cluster of these PS three's.
You have this very power full processing machine. What that
that is? Uh, that's one illustration of how behind this
project Sony is. But I haven't a more even uh
(09:10):
vivid thing because see Dr Kano figured it would take
about to buy the PlayStation three and this was you know,
a couple of years ago. They were still more they
were more expensive than since then. Um, but he was
able to talk Sony. He explained to Sony what he
wanted to do, and Sony Sony donated the eight machines
that he needed to create his gravity grid. So they
(09:33):
were absolutely saying yeah and are absolutely so, um, you
know they were. They were totally behind it, and it
made some noise at the time, which was good because
at the time Sony was having some difficulties selling them
because they were very expensive. And so when you know,
I was talking earlier about the the one PPE handing
(09:54):
out the the the individual jobs to the sp s.
The same thing can be said. If you Clu suster
these these devices together, you just you become you create
an even larger group. So it's like a group of
managers and a group of employees and so uh, you
effectively increase the processing ability of this these machines, you know,
(10:15):
by however many you managed to network together, and you
can network lots of these together. You don't. It doesn't
have to just be eight. That was the size of
the cluster that um Dr Khanna decided to to go with.
But uh, and it admit the processing needs that you
had at the time. The US Air Force is doing
a similar project. You know, we were talking abouts threes.
(10:39):
It's actually closer to undred. They already had over three
hundred uh already set aside for supercomputing. But it's the
same sort of concept is linking these together. You install
Linux on them, you create clusters, and using these clusters
you can solve really complex problems and and and parallel problems. Again,
(11:02):
once again we have to differentiate. Um has to be
a complex parallel problem for these clusters to actually be effective.
This is very similar in a way to what quantum
computing promises us. You may remember we talked about quantum
computing in a previous podcast. Actually we may have talked
about a couple of times. But quantum computers use cubits
(11:23):
rather than just regular bits, and a cubit can be
a zero or a one, or theoretically anything in between
at the same time, so you are able to do
multiple You're able to execute multiple processes all at once
because these cubits are fulfilling all possibilities at the same time.
The difference between quantum computers and networking a bunch of
(11:44):
p S three's together is the results from a quantum
computer are going to be generated in probabilities, so you
get you'll get maybe a range of potential answers with
a percentage of how likely each one is correct, so
you'll never be certain that the answer that has the
highest percentage, you know, the highest probability of being correct,
(12:06):
is in fact the really correct one, which is kind
of weird, but that's quantum for you. Yeah, probably, yeah. Um.
You know it's funny too because, just as an aside,
every time somebody says cubits, I think of the the
length measurements, not which is cub i T you're thinking
(12:27):
about building an arc, Well, yeah, everybody thinks of the arc,
probably because of the Bill Cosby bit. What the hell
is a cubit? Yeah, but now these are q bits, Yeah,
which is an entirely different. Animals say a distant cousin
to q Bert. Right. UM. That amazes me. That's why
(12:47):
I bring up Cubert as often as possible. The Air
Force is actually going to be using this cluster to
test a way of processing multiple radar images. Basically, they
want to build them into fire resolution versions of those
images UM, and other projects including high definition video processing. UM.
(13:08):
You know, pretty heavy stuff. UM. But you know it
requires that much processing power and it actually apparently is
going to be handled at the Air Force Reach Research
Laboratories Information Center in Rome, New York. So. UM, it's
a very very specialized unit. It sounds like from the
from the descriptions I've read, UM. But what's really interesting
(13:31):
is you can do this yourself if you are. I
was wondering if we were going to go into the
how too, because this is this gets kind of complicated. No,
I wasn't going to go in depth into the how to,
but I was going to point out that uh Dr
Khanna and another UM, the U Mass Dartmouth Principal investigator H.
Chris Poulin, have a guide available to It's free, it's
(13:53):
open source. All you need to do is go to
PS three cluster dot org and you can find out
how to build your on PlayStation three uh cluster computer,
and they even tell you how you can still play
games on it, although it does require a special boot
system in order to boot back into the regular proprietary
PS three operating system, which is very very cool. Yeah,
(14:15):
so in general, I can run through like the high
level steps because we can't really get into the details.
It's really really complicated. Well, yeah, I'm not sure that
anybody is going to take the podcast and yeah, but
just just so you kind of get an idea of
what goes into this is that you you have to
be able to uh get a particular they they recommend
(14:35):
a specific Linux distribution that you then uh you uh
image onto a DVD and you use that as a
part of what you're going to do for the the
operating system for the Sony PS three. You also have
to have a USB memory stick to get a special
boot command on that um uh you put the image
(14:55):
of that on there. They actually host that file on
the site itself, and you using these together, you can
go into a Sony PlayStation three menu and there's actually
a choice to um switch the operating system to other
So you I mean, it's built in you can change
it that way. I mean that shows you that Sony
(15:17):
was thinking ahead and was being very accommodating to this
kind of hacking. Um, and we're using hacking in the uh,
not not in the malicious sense, but in the hey,
let's make this thing that does this particular task do
something totally unrelated, which is really cool. Let's take it
apart and see what else we can make it. So
(15:38):
you has they have steps for installing Linux onto the machine,
which is actually it's a multi step process, um and
it it might be a little intimidating, but if you
actually follow the instructions that are on the website, they're
very comprehensive and they you know you don't. It's one
of those things where it's better if you do know everything,
(15:58):
like the reasons why you are are going through these steps,
but it's not necessary because they tell you what to
do anyway, so you could just blindly follow the steps
and as long as you do that, you should be
all right. And uh. After you've installed Lenox, it's time
to create something called the message passing interface, which is
that's the way that it it processes information and networks information.
(16:23):
And you also have to get the uh software Developer Kit,
so that you can actually make it do whatever it
is that you plan on having it do, whether that's
search for intelligent life or plot thermonuclear war. I mean,
it's really up to you basically at that point, it's
just a tool. It's not that you know, it's not
gonna run your games better, let me put it that way.
(16:44):
You're not gonna suddenly see and improve performance from your
p S three as far as gaming is concerned. But
you can use it as a very powerful computer. And
if you have a particular project that requires parallel processing
and that's a lot of ps. Yeah, that thing we've
got a pop filed are here. Um. But if you
if you happen to have that that need, this could
(17:05):
be a resource for you, especially now that the prices dropped. Um.
And it's that's it's kind of interesting too that it's
gained so much traction as an idea to use the
PlayStation three as a model for the or and I
guess a unit to be built into a cluster UM.
The Cluster Workshop project, the one that we're just talking about,
is as now partially funded by the National Science Foundation. UM.
(17:29):
So it's you know, it's received that level of support
in the scientific community. So um, and from what I
could tell, it looks like a lot of people have
adopted the idea. Um, it's just one of those things
where when the military goes out and buys a whole
lot of game consoles and networked into a cluster computer.
It's it's it makes headlines because it's an interesting story.
(17:50):
Well yeah, and when you think about it, having to
submit that budget request up the chain of command to
the point where you know ultimately it's going to go
to some sort of politicians, it can be a challenge
to explain to someone not it's not not I don't
want to use the word savvy, but not particularly informed
(18:12):
about the possibility of of networking these devices together in
order to make an actual computer. Uh. You know, on
the surface, you just say, why the heck do you
want video game consoles? Uh? So, I mean that would
definitely be a challenge. I would not want to be
the guy who has to explain, especially if if I
were in a chain of command situation, I might not
(18:32):
even understand it. You know, it might be like three
people below me have have that information and then I'm
kind of stuck. But that is It is a nice
interesting way to solve the problem because supercomputers are not
just expensive. I mean, not all research facilities purchase supercomputers.
(18:52):
In fact, most don't. Most end up essentially, um not
not renting time, but getting having to I'm granted to
them to use a supercomputer, either through grant money or
sometimes the supercomputer, uh resource has a quota to meet
of a certain number of hours of processing time they
(19:13):
have to dedicate to research projects. But you've got you've
got more projects, and you have supercomputers, so you know
that time becomes a precious commodity. And if you if
you aren't able to book that time when your research
project is active, then it could be really hard to
keep that project going long enough for you to be
able to get the access. So this is a really
(19:34):
it's a viable alternative. Yeah. Yeah, And another nice thing
too is that, you know, it's one of the things
that keeps Google's data centers running. Mean, they use thousands
and thousands of computers as servers. You know, if one
of them goes down, there's some redundancy. So I would
assume although I you know, it's just one of those
things that just came to me I haven't researched it,
but I would assume if one of the PlayStations, um,
(19:57):
you know, gives up the ghost, then you could pull
it out and you know, put another machine in there
far more affordably than you could if you're a supercomputer,
you know, your crazy definitely, definitely, because you're talking about
you know, off the shelf components versus sometimes uh very
specific um unique parts. I mean, some of these supercomputers
(20:19):
are running on chips that you know, they essentially come
out of the lab and go into a supercomputer, so
they're not even at the mass production phase necessarily for
some of these chips, whereas with the p S three
you just go to best Buy or you know something
and just pick one off the shelf and go and
you buy it and you're done. You have to go
back and you you know, you have to of course
install the operating system and and and attach it to
(20:41):
your cluster part of the cluster. It's not like it's
just plug in play. But it's a lot easier than
if you suddenly had your supercomputer go oopsie on you. Yeah,
not that I've ever heard of a PlayStation three having
that kind of a problem. Now that's more of an
Xbox three sixty kind of thing. See, now people are
gonna write to me and say that I hate the
Xbox three six, despite the fact that I am an
(21:01):
avid Xbox fan. But come on, guys, that red ring
of death. Seriously. Oh you know, I I wouldn't mind having.
I don't own either one, and I would like at
PlayStation three and an Xbox reason so would I put
it on my Amazon wish list, And no one has
picked it up yet. I keep checking. Well, you know,
look in your stocking. We'll see what we can do.
(21:23):
And I have been gaining a lot of weight. My
stocking has been getting larger, Leon is getting larger. Well,
I guess, uh, that's a good discussion about the p
S three supercomputer connection. Um, that was a great question, Tim.
He actually he actually, Although I said it was a
listener text message, he sent his request via phone, which
a lot of you have been doing. And it just
(21:43):
shows that our listeners are super cool smartphone users, which
is awesome. Um. Well, I guess that wraps up that discussion,
but it does lead us to a little listener mail.
This listener mail comes from Immanual Emmanuel says, Hey, they're
imitating Jonathan because you guys are awesome. Thank you. You
(22:06):
guys mentioned that NATAL uses only gestures and it is
unsure of whether it will be too much of a
leap in technology. However, one thing you forgot to mention
is that NATAL can actually scan physical objects, which then
allows you to use real world objects in your games.
This can range from skateboards, tennis rackets, to an air
soft gun for first person shoots, etcetera. In my humble opinion,
(22:28):
the developers are really in control of whether or not
their game will implement some sort of physical object. The
only way to find out is to wait until the
release date. We shall see. I'm Emmanuel from Bermuda and
this is my okay. Now, this was a request from Immanual.
So anyone who gets annoyed by me yelling into the microphone,
this is your opportunity. Turned down the volume now, okay,
(22:50):
I'm going to count to three, and after that I'm
gonna fulfill Emmanual's requests. Remember this is a manual asking
for this, so please turn down your volume one, two, three.
Listener Maid in the tone that you used to use
(23:12):
because it always managed to make me laugh. Thanks Emmanuel,
I hope you guys were able to turn your volume
down in time. Don't send me iTunes reviews and say
that you hated it. I gave you plenty of opportunity
that time, guys. You know, I have to say it's
it's funny because, um, both sides are pretty vocal about
whether they liked or hated that. Yeah, we get email
(23:32):
all the time about people who say, thank you for
changing that, that was irritating, or I really miss the
way you used to say listener mail. And then we
still get reviews on iTunes that say I hate how
he yells into the microphone, Like I haven't done that
for like three months anyway, So I guess they're just
listening to all the old episodes. Thanks a lot, Emanuel.
(23:52):
That is a good point. Yes, Natal can scan objects
like like a skateboard. So it's kind of similar to
the Tony Hawk Ride game that came mount where you
have a very special controller that's in the shape of
a skateboard. Use that as a controller. Why are you
looking at me like that? Nothing? So anyway, you can
scan like a board and use it as if it
were one of those controllers. Now, granted the board you
(24:14):
scan would just be a normal board. It wouldn't even
have any controls in it or anything. It's an't all
scanning it and then interpreting that. So when I said
that you would have to use like just your empty
hand for like a lightsaber game, I totally forgot. No,
you don't necessarily have to do that. It may allow
you to scan an object and use that as the
hilt of a lightsaber, which could then help you defeat
(24:37):
the forces of evil, or if you are like me,
make everyone join the empire. I have a plus three
slice of pizza. Fear me. Okay, now you're mixing genres
and and different kinds of games. I'm gonna have to
close this out. If any of you would like to
send us mail, our address is tex Stuff at how
(24:58):
stuff works dot com. Remember we got a live show,
tech Stuff Live every Tuesday one pm Eastern. You can
find a link to that through the blogs and the
blog links are on how stuff works dot com on
the right hand side and Crispy and I will talk
to you again really soon. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
(25:20):
and be sure to check out the new tech stuff
blog now on the house, Stuff Works homepage, brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,
are you
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