I stumbled across a few articles about the Cell processor in the Sony PS3 -- right about when the price dropped to $500 -- so now I own a purported super-computer.
At any rate, it wasn't too hard to find the 3.7 gig Yellow Dog Linux download and burn a dvd:
tp://ftp.yellowdoglinux.com/pub/yellowdog/iso/yellowdog-5.0.2-20070711.iso
ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/ydl/iso/yellow ... 070711.iso
http://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/yellowdog/iso ... 070711.iso
http://mirror.anl.gov/yellowdog/iso/yel ... 070711.iso
Then I used the instructions on this page to install Linux:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power ... inuxps3-1/
Not too hard overall -- I lack that patience that most "L33T" Unix hackers seem to have.
At any rate, I hope to learn some Cell programming -- and I figure it migth have benefits in running CFD simulations (hence the post).
At any rate, just posting this (from FIrefox running in my PS3) fwiw.
Toys R Us Super Computer
Moderator: Mike Everman
[/url]PS3 "butchery"
Actually, it's a PS3, and it is designed to allow a dual-boot.
Very cheap for a super-computer (like $0.20 per gflop)
Very cheap for a super-computer (like $0.20 per gflop)
More PS3 stuff
Haven't had as much time as I'd like to fiddle with this, but I have loaded and executed an interactive Ray Tracer program (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/irt) and I installed and built CorePy (http://www.corepy.org/), which is an augmented version of Python that allows one to write native assembly language components on the host system. One of the CorePy test applications ran for about 60 seconds and announced that it was performing computations at 150GFLOPS when it finished. I'm not sure what those 9 trillion floating point operations were about, but hey ...
The most interesting thing about this is that the Yellow Dog Linux installation makes it pretty easy to participate in open-source stuff. To build CorePy, I just opened a terminal session, typed in the "subversion" commands as described and I had all the source code on my machine (i.e. subversion, CVS etc. are all pre-installed). Then I ran the build as described in the documentation, and magically had a usable, installed version of CorePy when I was done (so all the GNU development tools are pre-installed as well). That was my first foray into open source -- painless.
It also has Eclipse and full Java development stuff installed and a ton of other stuff that would warm the heard of any geek.
The 40g version of the machine is currently $400 u.s. -- and you get five free blu-ray DVDs with that. The machine would be a decent PC for that price alone, but since it is also a BluRay player and a top-of-the-line gaming system, it's really a steal.
The disk space (40g) is easy to upgrade with any SATA notebook drive or you can just add outboard storage with USB drives.
I thin that I'm going to buy at least one more of these -- maybe even more than that.
The most interesting thing about this is that the Yellow Dog Linux installation makes it pretty easy to participate in open-source stuff. To build CorePy, I just opened a terminal session, typed in the "subversion" commands as described and I had all the source code on my machine (i.e. subversion, CVS etc. are all pre-installed). Then I ran the build as described in the documentation, and magically had a usable, installed version of CorePy when I was done (so all the GNU development tools are pre-installed as well). That was my first foray into open source -- painless.
It also has Eclipse and full Java development stuff installed and a ton of other stuff that would warm the heard of any geek.
The 40g version of the machine is currently $400 u.s. -- and you get five free blu-ray DVDs with that. The machine would be a decent PC for that price alone, but since it is also a BluRay player and a top-of-the-line gaming system, it's really a steal.
The disk space (40g) is easy to upgrade with any SATA notebook drive or you can just add outboard storage with USB drives.
I thin that I'm going to buy at least one more of these -- maybe even more than that.
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tufty
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Cell is really interesting, architecture-wise, and having access to 6 SPEs in what's really a pretty low-priced package is very nifty. It's a bloody hard architecture to write for, though, especially if you're after extreme performance, although there are certain parallels with writing Altivec code on the G4.
I'd like to have one to play with. Given that the current crop of games for the PS3 don't float my boat, that play would, of necessity, be compiler-based :)
Blu-ray can go get fecked, though.
Simon
I'd like to have one to play with. Given that the current crop of games for the PS3 don't float my boat, that play would, of necessity, be compiler-based :)
Blu-ray can go get fecked, though.
Simon