| Prosjekttittel: | LINPACK Benchmarks for Miriam PS3 Cluster |
| Organisasjon/Bedrift: | Miriam |
| Kontaktperson(er): | Christophe Spaggiari mob.: 906 98 899 |
| Prosjektbeskrivelse: |
In the context of its “Gas Simulation and Forecasting Center”, Miriam AS is setting up, in
cooperation with the Arena project (Inkubator Halden) a high performance computing center partly
made of an array of 64 PS3 game consoles from Sony. The peak processing power of such a cluster
(PPU + 7 SPU + RSX) has a theoretical value of 37 TFlops (equivalent to 3.936 computers
equipped with Xeon Dual 51xx at 2.33Ghz) which scores pretty high in the TOP500 list of the most
powerful clusters in the world (www.top500.org). But the ranking of this list is based on Linpack
benchmark and it does not exists any implementation specially made to unleash the PS3 processing
capabilities. IBM has already made an implementation of the Linpaxk package for the Cell BE
processor but the PS3 offers and extra 356 GFlops to exploit, thanks to its RSX GPU and that's not
part of IBM implementation. The aim of this project is to use Sony SDK for PS3 in order to implement a PS3 optimized version of the Linpack benchmark that would use all the processing capabilities of the PS3. The same way that it has been done by the Stanford university for the protein folding project (http://folding.stanford.edu/). The goal is to demonstrate that the cluster deployed in Halden can enter the TOP500. A rough estimation is telling us that we should be able to enter withing the 200 first position. The rewarding for the students participating to this project could be very big. If they demonstrate that our cluster enters the TOP500 at a good position they would get quite some press coverage in Norway and outside. The project will be made in cooperation with IBM and Sony but we don't know yet to what extend.
The outcome should be the validation of the Linpack ranking for the TOP500, and as part of the
validation process, the development of a framework to allow using the 64 PS3 as a cluster (PVM
like, task spawning, etc ....). A position could be available in Miriam AS for going further with this
topic in the context of the “Gas Simulation and Forecasting Center”
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