SGER: Evaluation of the Sony PS3 for projects in computational physics

SGER：针对计算物理项目的索尼 PS3 评估

• 批准号: 0831631
• 负责人: Gaurav Khanna
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-07-01 至 2009-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0831631&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SGER; Evaluation; Sony; PS3; projects

This award funds exploring the use of the Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) gaming console for scientific computing in gravitational wave physics. If successful, this approach would yield a significantly higher cost effectiveness (measured as performance per dollar) compared with traditional Beowulf compute clusters. The project will focus on investigating the performance of the PS3 for projects in numerical relativity and LIGO data analysis. Part of the project is dedicated to identifying the specific codes and libraries that will need tuning for the PS3/Cell architecture in order to perform well. Any Cell processor specific optimizations that are implemented in publicly available source code as a result of this study, will be made freely available via a website.This project will explore the feasibility of a novel extension of the cost-effective Beowulf cluster approach towards supercomputing, using very low-cost special purpose hardware, such as the Sony PS3. If successful, this approach suggests that it may be possible to reach a performance per dollar that is over an order of magnitude higher than what can be achieved through traditional means. Thus, this project will clearly have serious implications for cluster computing and scientific computing, in general. In particular, if PS3 clusters yield these benefits, searches of LIGO data and simulations of gravitational wave sources could move into computer intensive regimes not now possible.

该奖项资金探讨了Sony PlayStation 3（PS3）游戏机在引力波物理学中使用科学计算的使用。如果成功的话，与传统的Beowulf计算集群相比，这种方法将产生明显更高的成本效益（以每美元的绩效衡量）。该项目将着重于研究数值相对论和LIGO数据分析项目的PS3的性能。该项目的一部分致力于确定需要对PS3/Cell架构进行调整以表现良好的特定代码和库。由于本研究的结果，在公开源代码中实施的任何细胞处理器特定优化，都将通过网站自由提供。本项目将使用非常低成本的专用硬件（例如Syony PS3）探索具有成本效益的Beowulf群集方法的新型扩展的Beowulf群集方法。如果成功的话，这种方法表明，可以达到比传统手段所能达到的数量级高的每一美元的绩效。因此，这个项目显然将对集群计算和科学计算具有严重的影响。特别是，如果PS3簇产生这些好处，则对Ligo数据的搜索和重力波源的模拟现在可能无法进入计算机密集型制度。