PS3 helps Military Supercomputer Set Record?

[Cipher]

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.


The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.


The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Now, while this may seem rather bland news, there is a fascinating aspect to this story.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

This actually lends a great bit of credibility to the claims that Sony has made for such a long time as to the power of the Cell processors that it uses in its console. A large portion of developers did not want to code games for the PS3 due to the Cell architecture being notoriously difficult to work with.

Source

[SonicSpeed]

The PS3 wasn't used in this btw. It was just a bunch of Cell procs, as well as a bunch of Opterons.

[Bonerheimer]

The Cell processors in Roadrunner have higher floating point accuracy than the PS3 Cell chips

[Dopefish]

Which makes them slower.

The whole reason FPU is so past is because they sacrifice accuracy for speed. Even on our home PCs, you can get FAR greater accuracy doing slow integer calculations rather than using the FPU. But the FPU is used just because it's so fast.


Edit:
And just to point this out, this is why you can often see rogue, single white pixels around textures, polygons, objects, etc. in most games. This is because the FPU isn't accurate enough to seal everything up. You can never have it perfect.

[DominiKing]

So the PS3 has nothing to do with this? Other than the fact that they both have Cell processors right?

[SonicSpeed]

Originally Posted by DominiKing

So the PS3 has nothing to do with this? Other than the fact that they both have Cell processors right?

Correct.