One of those institutions is the University of Dayton in Ohio, where it’s being put to work creating “artificial neural networks”.
The University of Massachusetts is another, assistant professor of physics Gaurav Khanna given access to Condor to help him model the effects of things like black holes colliding and ripples in space-time.
Khanna is full of praise for the toughness of the PS3, saying of his own PS3 supercomputer (which uses 16 consoles in a machine called the “Gravity Grid”) “They’ve been running almost continuously for four years now and it’s a non-ideal environment. It’s a lab, there are students.” Not a single one of the consoles has needed replacement in that time.
Lucky they never need to connect to the PlayStation Network, then.
PlayStation 3 Clusters Providing Low-Cost Supercomputing to Universities [Govtech]
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Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:43 AM“Lucky they never need to connect to the PlayStation Network, then”
Badum-tish!
I feel like just sitting them on shelves is a wasted opportunity. They should be mounted onto a circular rack with row upon row of them looking out at you like some kind of 80s science fiction AI brain.
Korwin
Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 12:36 PMThe joke works two ways. If they’d connected to the PSN they would have needed to update the Firmware, thus loosing the other OS feature :D