On Sat, Dec 06, 2008 at 07:47:10PM +0000, Tony Travis wrote: > I'm interested in the PS3 as a cheap way of getting my hands on a Cell > processor (PowerPC + 8SPE's). Ubuntu runs on it, and I'm interested in > finding out how good it is for bioinformatics. I nearly bought one at > half the price when I was in Canada, but it would not work in the UK.
There are a couple of projects using clusters of PS3's for various things (I suspect you'll have seen most of these already): http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/ http://www.scei.co.jp/folding/en/ I've spoken to a few people who've played with the cell for HPC and have gotten very mixed opinions about it. I think it's possible to get really good performance out of it if you have a problem that fits its architecture (works on a few streams of data without too much branching or random data access) but the code needs tweaking (or completely rewriting) to get that performance and it requires thinking a bit differently compare to current processors. Robert ________________________________________________________________________ Robert McWilliam [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ormiret.com Stress is when you wake up screaming and then realize you haven't fallen asleep yet. -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
