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PS3 passes the Petaflop line in Folding

by Nick Haywood on 26 September 2007, 11:13

Tags: PlayStation 3, Sony Computers Entertainment Europe (NYSE:SNE), PS3

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qajwz

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All power to the Cell!

Over on the PlayStation Blog they're patting themselves on the back for the massive contribution the PS3 has made to the Folding project.

Yep, in less than a year, PS3 owners have contributed over a Petaflop of data to the project... and if you have a look at the stats page on the Folding Website, you'll see the PS3 has far outstripped anything else... which is seriously impressive.

Ok, so the PS3 can only fold a limited type of work unit meaning it's less flexible than a standard PC based CPU, regardless of OS, but the overall contribution to medical science and the fight against a multitude of diseases can't be ignored.

So, want to get in on the action and start doing your bit for the greater good? It's dead easy to do and HEXUS has it's own Folding Team, who'll answer all of your questions and get you up and running over in our Distributed Computing Forum.

Come on, put your PS3's downtime to good use!



HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Posted by vinnyT - Wed 26 Sep 2007 12:54
That is impressive. I wonder how much follding would have been done if there was a decent PS3 game?
Posted by directhex - Wed 26 Sep 2007 12:56
what surprises me is folding not using double-precision floating point arithmetic, which is the bare minimum in computational science - cell's double precision performance is over 10x slower than its single precision performance
Posted by jamiecockrill - Wed 26 Sep 2007 12:57
Taking TFLOPs/number of CPUs as a kind of measure of how quick these things are, PS3s wipe the floor with general purpose CPUs. It's interesting to note though, that by this metric, GPUs are indeed better, but there's less of em. Do GPUs only take certain work unit types too? (does anyone know?)

Following on, on the point that PS3's can only do one type of work unit, does anyone know how CPUs compare to the PS3 on those work units? is it still such a whitewash?
Posted by Andrzej - Wed 26 Sep 2007 16:06
jamiecockrill
…Do GPUs only take certain work unit types too?…
My understanding is that they take (pretty much) most work units - but that their unique parallelism only allows them to excel with certain units

Could be wrong - but I believe this is the case :)
Posted by DataMatrix - Wed 26 Sep 2007 21:35
This doesn't impress me whatsoever.

Average TFLOPS per processor
GPU average: 0.0595
PS3 average: 0.0247

If there were more GPUs folding, they would crush the PS3 by producing over twice as much processing power.

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