Remember when Sony promoted the PS3 with the famous Cell chip? A microprocessor that, according to them, boasted unparalleled power in the field of consoles . It was expensive technology, but even so, the cheapest way to access it was with a PS3.
That is why Marc Stevens and his team worked with a cluster of no less than 215 PS3 consoles at EPFL, the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne. The reason? They were cheaper than using similar computers and they didn’t perform badly at all.
I once used the cluster of 215 PlayStation 3s at EPFL, that was a lot of cheap computing power at the time. And unlike for other CPUs, assembly programming for SPUs was quite magical: exact clockcycle predictions just from code. pic.twitter.com/d5h2JakZbE
— Marc Stevens (@realhashbreaker)
I once used a cluster of 215 PlayStation 3 consoles at EPFL, as it was a lot of very cheap computing power back then. And unlike other CPUs, programming in assembly language for SPUs was quite magical: exact cycle predictions only from code.
A cluster of servers, as it is often called, is a set of many computers connected to each other so that they function as one . According to Stevens in another tweet, the PS3 had a good GPU for the time, as well as very good development tools. Remember that in its early years the console could run Linux without problems.
In fact, it is not the first cluster of PS3 that has existed. As early as 2007, Wired magazine reported an astrophysicist, Dr. Gaurav Khann, who had replaced a supercomputer with eight PS3 consoles . Imagine then what it must have been like to work with 215.
What happened to all those PS3s when they stopped being useful? As Stevens himself explains, EPFL gave them away completely free to all students who requested them . However, the deal seemed so unreal that for a while no one believed it. When one student found out firsthand that it was true, the rest flocked and sold out in no time.
If you want to see more of this peculiar computing solution with the Sony console, Stevens has posted a few photos right here.
