A group of researchers at the University of Alabama, decided to check a series of disturbances on the assumption (and vibration) black holes, used PlayStation 3 as a supercomputer to solve the equations from the theory of relativity General (necessary in this case). They built a supercomputer-based PlayStation 3 for this purpose. Read Article
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Sixteen PlayStation 3 to simulate a black hole
Sixteen consoles unmodified
The researchers used sixteen consoles, provided by Sony and unmodified on the hardware level, for their supercomputer. They used a Linux for Power PC (the CPU which is part of Cell of the console) and development tools that IBM offers its own servers based on Cell. The consoles are connected by a simple Gigabit Ethernet network and synchronization through OpenMPI recently focused on PowerPC. According to the sponsors, their cluster reaches 40 gigaflops Linpack test (used for the performance of the Top500 supercomputer), knowing that RAM consoles is too low for this test and that the EPS of Cell used in the console are not very effective double precision (IBM has a version adapted to this type of calculation).
In the end, the power cost of a cluster-based PlayStation 3 is very good, much better than the supercomputers of comparable power.
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