Why scientists love games consoles

[wraggster]

Leading scientists are turning to the extraordinary power of games consoles to do their sums and simulate everything from colliding black holes to the effects of drugs.

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Reprogram a PlayStation and it will perform feats that would be unthinkable on an ordinary PC because the kinds of calculations required to produce the realistic graphics now seen in sophisticated video games are similar to those used by chemists and physicists as they simulate the interactions between particles ranging from the molecular to the astronomical.

advertisementSuch simulations are usually carried out on a supercomputer, but time on these machines is expensive and in short supply. By comparison, games consoles are cheap and easily available, says New Scientist.

"There is no doubt that the entertainment industry is helping to drive the direction of high performance computational science - exploiting the power available to the masses will lead to many research breakthroughs in the future," comments Prof Peter Coveney of University College London, who uses supercomputing in chemistry.

Prof Gaurav Khanna at the University of Massachusetts has used an array of 16 PS3s to calculate what will happen when two black holes merge.

According to Prof Khanna, the PS3 has unique features that make it suitable for scientific computations, namely, the Cell processor dubbed a "supercomputer-on-a-chip." And it runs on Linux, "so it does not limit what you can do."

"A single high-precision simulation can sometimes cost more than 5,000 hours on the TeraGrid supercomputers. For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer using PS3s. It works just as well, has no long wait times and can be used over and over again, indefinitely," Prof Khanna says.

And Todd Martínez has persuaded the supercomputing centre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to buy eight computers each driven by two of the specialised chips that are at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 3 console.

Together with his student Benjamin Levine he is using them to simulate the interactions between the electrons in atoms, as part of work to see how proteins in the body dovetail with drug molecules.

He was inspired while browsing through his son's games console's technical specification "I noticed that the architecture looked a lot like high performance supercomputers I had seen before," he says. "That's when I thought about getting one for myself."

The Wii, made by Nintendo, has a motion tracking remote control unit that is cheaper than a comparable device built from scratch. The device recently emerged as a tool to help surgeons to improve their technique.

Meanwhile, neurologist Thomas Davis at the Vanderbilt Medical Centre in Nashville, Tennessee, is using it to measure movement deficiencies in Parkinson's patients to assess how well a patient can move when they take part in drug trials.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...console117.xml

[osgeld]

this says alot about the scientific community

yes the ps3 is gonna be faster than your old rusty 1980 timeshare mainframes and your 499$ dell celerons, but damn man by the time you pay IBM-Sony to engineer you a cell processor computer you could have bought a more powerfull desktop cray

grab your ears and pull your head out of your asses

[Mister Klownes]

I'd like someone to bring up these facts, along with Folding@home and the general usage of video games by many surgeons to "limber up" before operating when speaking to that crazy woman a while back with the console abandonment issues.

We may all be man-children, but we're doing more to save the world than you are -_-

[visigoth]

My lecturer at Monash has 4 PS3s as well doing the exact same thing

[mike_jmg]

I didn't know game consoles could be used for such great purposes, Nice!

[Xarius]

There's also an app for the PS3 that uses your idle ps3 at home to help collect molecular simulations. There's a PC version around somewhere too.

[MicroNut]

this says alot about the scientific community

yes the ps3 is gonna be faster than your old rusty 1980 timeshare mainframes and your 499$ dell celerons, but damn man by the time you pay IBM-Sony to engineer you a cell processor computer you could have bought a more powerfull desktop cray

grab your ears and pull your head out of your asses

The Flat Earth Society has a place reserved just for you. Pop!
In the mean time try giving up everything science has made possible... it speaks volumes.
Unless your one of these nutters...

There's also an app for the PS3 that uses your idle ps3 at home to help collect molecular simulations. There's a PC version around somewhere too.

Folding at Home is built in as an available application that comes with the PS3 firmware.
Helping fold proteins will help those *crazy* scientist cure more diseases.
The PS3 has been a huge boon to the distributed "super computing" community since it was released.

[sappo]

How much load of crap. They should use REAL supercomputers for calculations, not a console...

Obviously they got paid by Sony to make the PS3 look more worthwhile. I can't believe that some scientist seriously can use a console to make calcuations.

And if it's real, then this explains why great medical discoveries happen so rarely.

[Xarius]

How much load of crap. They should use REAL supercomputers for calculations, not a console...

Obviously they got paid by Sony to make the PS3 look more worthwhile. I can't believe that some scientist seriously can use a console to make calcuations.

And if it's real, then this explains why great medical discoveries happen so rarely.

So rather than using the millions of idle processors around the world for free, scientists should be spending their time and effort into putting together buisiness proposals to convince investors to shell out cash for amazingly expensive supercomputers?

Things like this are not hindering the progression of science. It's giving cheap processing power to labs that would otherwise not have anything greater than a 4 year old dell.

[osgeld]

The Flat Earth Society has a place reserved just for you. Pop!
In the mean time try giving up everything science has made possible... it speaks volumes.
Unless your one of these nutters...

no it speaks volumes of how the researchers of the world cant bother to research their own friggin equipment

again the MILLIONS of dollars they are pissing away on roughly the same cpu power as a 3 ghz quad core they could have had a cray that is a serious scientific computer