We are figuring out that more and more people own a PS3, but the lack of compatible projects (only 2 available, \"PS3GRID and Yoyo@home) is limiting the installation of the BOINC Paltform on them. I would be interesting that you develop an application for Linux PowerPC and so could take advantage of an enormous computing power that will be raising with time to reach, we hope, the PetaFlops. That was possible for Folding@home so why not for BOINC.
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SETI, PS3Grid and yoyo has a PS3 SPE appication. SIMAP and Einstein and PPE only application.
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/ Ok
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We are figuring out that more and more people own a PS3, but the lack of compatible projects (only 2 available, \"PS3GRID and Yoyo@home) is limiting the installation of the BOINC Paltform on them. I would be interesting that you develop an application for Linux PowerPC and so could take advantage of an enormous computing power that will be raising with time to reach, we hope, the PetaFlops. That was possible for Folding@home so why not for BOINC.
I believe that to date no one has figured out how to extract the max computing power out of a \"cell\" based chip for Boinc. It is different than a regular computers chip and therefore the program must be written specifically for it. Now the PS3 has like 8 \"cell\" chips inside each machine. But as of now, no one has gotten them to use all 8 to do much, except play games. The potential seems to be there but the practicality of it is not yet.
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/ OK, thus there will not be of Malaria@home on PS3?
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/ OK, thus there will not be of Malaria@home on PS3?
Boinc must be written for the PS3 first, then it must be efficient, then it can be ported over so Malaria can run on it. Malaria does not currently, and may never for that matter, allow individuals to modify Boinc. I am pretty sure that means that the Malaria programmers would have to do it.
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/ OK, thus there will not be of Malaria@home on PS3?
Boinc must be written for the PS3 first, then it must be efficient, then it can be ported over so Malaria can run on it. Malaria does not currently, and may never for that matter, allow individuals to modify Boinc. I am pretty sure that means that the Malaria programmers would have to do it.
BOINC is still working on the PS3 and must not rewritten. Some science projects still use them - see my previous posting...
The big problem is the science application. If you wan\'t to make usage of the SPEs you have got to rewrite the science application that is move the science tasks out of the 6 SPEs. Here is the next problem, that the SPE has only 256 KB memory and a main memory of 256 MB. So you need to use some special libs and development tools to programm this. Also it depends very strong of the science application, if there would and benefits by using the SPEs and if you can parallize your application.
By the desgin of the PS3 you have not to see the PS3 as a multi core system. Due the hardware design is not posible to set the BOINC client as a 6 core system at the PS3.
Btw. the PS3 has 8 SPEs, but to use the Cell chips with manufacturing problems, the CPUs are hardcoded to 7 SPEs. One of the 7 SPEs is uses for special tasks, to 6 SPEs are usable.
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Just yesterday I downloaded the \"Install\" for the Boinc/PS3 application from PS3Grid. It\'s currently running Boinc for of course PS3Grid and I\'m about to attach to Einstein since I\'ve not done anything for that project in nearly a year. I did however attempt to attach to Malariacontrol. It attached, however I got a message stating that it didn\'t recognize the CPU.
From what I\'ve read/understand from others - Boinc on a PS3 can crunch, but if not optimized to it, it\'s just slower? At least that\'s the way I read it. I\'d still crunch malaria if I could, especially since PS3Grid is currently having problems passing out work. Any chance that simple error code could be fixed by having something recognize it so that we could at least crunch something? I can jot down and reply here with the exact wording of it if needed.
{note}-I read and I think it was \"Krunchin-Keith\", who stated he had 3 years of time in on various Boinc projects - yet with one installation of Boinc on his PS3 running PS3Grid (and maybe another I can\'t recall) he\'s nearly eclipsed all of those years of work within months utilizing one (1) PS3... THAT folks, says something.
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/ I did however attempt to attach to Malariacontrol. It attached, however I got a message stating that it didn\'t recognize the CPU.
You need the BOINC client and a science application for the platform you are using. But MalariaControll did not have any science application for the PS3.
From what I\'ve read/understand from others - Boinc on a PS3 can crunch, but if not optimized to it, it\'s just slower?
No. BOINC is working on the PS3, but you need also a science application from each project.
If the applicaton would be compiled native, you get not a good performance. The native application only uses the PPE (main CPU of the PS3), which is as fast as a Mac with a G4 CPU.
If the application would be rewritten to the special design of the PS3 to shift out the work to the special SPE CPUs of the PS3, the perfomance would be a lot of faster. But, the code rewriting is a lot of work.
At least that\'s the way I read it. I\'d still crunch malaria if I could, especially since PS3Grid is currently having problems passing out work. Any chance that simple error code could be fixed by having something recognize it so that we could at least crunch something? I can jot down and reply here with the exact wording of it if needed.
I think, the project admins have to decide, if they would build a PS3 application. But I think, that the applications are written in Fortran, the changes for a PS3 application is very less.
PS3Grid, SETI and Yoyo has a application which full utilizie the PS3 with the SPEs. SIMAP and Einstein has a applictaions which make usage of the PPE.
So these project would also been a alternative as aditional or backup project on the PS3.
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/ I think, the project admins have to decide, if they would build a PS3 application. But I think, that the applications are written in Fortran, the changes for a PS3 application is very less.
Any news on this? It would be nice to know if this is likely to happen or not :)
/ I think, the project admins have to decide, if they would build a PS3 application. But I think, that the applications are written in Fortran, the changes for a PS3 application is very less.
Any news on this? It would be nice to know if this is likely to happen or not :)
The newer versions of BOINC, such as 6.2.*, support running workunits on graphics chips instead of the CPU. There's still a shortage of BOINC projects that will run there.
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The newer versions of BOINC, such as 6.2.*, support running workunits on graphics chips instead of the CPU. There's still a shortage of BOINC projects that will run there.
You mean the next versions of BOINC, 6.4.x. Currently the only project is GPUgrid.
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The newer versions of BOINC, such as 6.2.*, support running workunits on graphics chips instead of the CPU. There's still a shortage of BOINC projects that will run there.
You mean the next versions of BOINC, 6.4.x. Currently the only project is GPUgrid.
Both are wrong sort of. Early 6.2 did have some co-processor support, but then it was withdrawn and a separate 6.3.x line started. No current projects support The GPU functions on those early versions. 6.4.X should have when it is time for that version but you are too far ahead on that. Currently the 6.3.X Series supports NVIDIA GPU (graphics co-processors), but also the project needs to have an specially written application to make use of the GPU. You can't just install BOINC and expect it to use the GPU with any current application on all projects. You should note 6.3.X is very experimental and not for everybody, it is still in development. Only windows and linux is supported at this time, but we have support for both 32 and 64 bit on both. We do not have a fully functioning version yet. This technology is only two months old, so we, developers, testers and users, are still learning. The only project with support for it is GPUGRID, part of PS3GRID. Currently only NVIDIA GPU's are supported. This is because NVIDIA supplies a toolkit to compile programs for it in C, easier to do, but still the application needs to be specially written to make use of the GPU, re-thunk from the ground up. For example when you program for a CPU, you program it to do 1 thing after another in a straight line, linear processing, or you attack a problem from one end. To program for a GPU, you program it to do multiple steps, up to 256, at the same time, parallel processing, or you attack a problem from all sides, dimensions and ends at the same time. I'm not sure how you program for ATI, but it is not as easy. The two are not compatible and each needs its own application written. The power of the GPU is far more than the PS3, PS3 max at about 230GFlops and current GPU's have a max of around 1000GFlops, if you can write an application to perform max ops per cycle, real world applications can not achieve this. I do not see the PS3 increasing in speed as easily as GPU's are. Plus with computers now you can have 1 to 4 GPU's per computer, depending on design. A year ago I would say projects should investigate writing for the PS3, but at this point the time to learn how to do that and the relatively small number of PS3, compared to computers, is small. It would however at this time be good for them to begin investigation GPU computing as this has become very popular in the last month, much more so than the year PS3's have been running. It is far easier and practical to upgrade a computer, or buy a new one, with a GPU than to buy a PS3 which can't be upgraded. I would estimate a lot of current computers are already running boinc and already have a compatible GPU. I would say most all new ones in the near future will have GPU's sold with them, there are even motherboards now with NVIDIA GPU's built in. I have noted that the cost of electricity of running a PS3 is about the same as the cost of running an average computer with a GPU. GPU power is far more than a PS3 or computer alone and it would greatly speed the science along. Figure current GPU's have a max of 1000GFLops vs computer CPU in the range of 10-30GFLops per core. Although it would be hard to create a real world application that runs at max, still any application written on the GPU is more powerful. For example the application running on the PS3 runs around 200GFlops (don't quote me exactly on these numbers) and runs 23 hours. This work is too complex to do on a CPU in any reasonable length of time, hence there is no CPU application at this project. The same work is done on the NVIDIA GPU in 6 to 16 hours. Because of the various speeds, number of co-processor cores (stream processors), anywhere from 32 to 256, amount of memory, it is hard to give exact numbers. I'm thinking though the GPUs are above 230GFlops on the GPUGRID application. Still this number is far greater than CPU's. The GPU processors run up to about 1900MHz, but there are up to 256 of those, compared to say a quad core running in the 3GHz range. Need I say more.
[edit]
Expressed another way.
My PS3's earn average 2.50cs per minute per PS3
My GPU's earn average 2.75cs per minute per GPU
One of my computers P4-HT @ 3.8GHz attached here earns about 0.23cs per minute for one CPU thread of the two.
So it would take 10 to 12 CPU cores to roughly equal a PS3 or GPU.
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Expressed another way.
My PS3's earn average 2.50cs per minute per PS3
My GPU's earn average 2.75cs per minute per GPU
One of my computers P4-HT @ 3.8GHz attached here earns about 0.23cs per minute for one CPU thread of the two.
So it would take 10 to 12 CPU cores to roughly equal a PS3 or GPU.
Overall you are correct, but the added credit comparison at the end is a bit unfair. More recent CPU's (such as the Q6600 or E6750) have per minute rates of around twice what your HT machine is averaging. Indeed, the HT is a considerable constraint on speed (though the total throughput of the machine is certainly increased). True dual core machines do not suffer from this problem. Also, the newest CPU's (e.g., those using a 45nm manufacturing process) are even faster. Finally, depending on the project, 64-bit processing has yielded as much as 50% increases in throughput.
So I'd say a fairer comparison with a new processor (say a Q9450) using a 64 bit OS and application would make 3 to 4 cores equal to a PS3 or GPU.
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Expressed another way.
My PS3's earn average 2.50cs per minute per PS3
My GPU's earn average 2.75cs per minute per GPU
One of my computers P4-HT @ 3.8GHz attached here earns about 0.23cs per minute for one CPU thread of the two.
So it would take 10 to 12 CPU cores to roughly equal a PS3 or GPU.
Overall you are correct, but the added credit comparison at the end is a bit unfair. More recent CPU's (such as the Q6600 or E6750) have per minute rates of around twice what your HT machine is averaging. Indeed, the HT is a considerable constraint on speed (though the total throughput of the machine is certainly increased). True dual core machines do not suffer from this problem. Also, the newest CPU's (e.g., those using a 45nm manufacturing process) are even faster. Finally, depending on the project, 64-bit processing has yielded as much as 50% increases in throughput.
So I'd say a fairer comparison with a new processor (say a Q9450) using a 64 bit OS and application would make 3 to 4 cores equal to a PS3 or GPU.
Yes, but CPU's are at about the current max with little room to improve. However GPU computing is new and multi core processing, which they do will, will be the next step, happing now. They have room to improve or add more threads or speed. I've also heard CUDA (NVIDIA) has released a SDK toolkit to do multi core CUDA processing on CPU's, so what would happen is 1 task would run across 4 cores, those getting done much quicker than using a single core, probably the end result would be 4 tasks run one after the other across 4 cores would end up running faster than say 4 tasks running at the same time 1 per core, if the programmer is cleaver enough to make max use or efficiency of the technique, caching and stuff like that. ATI has also just released a SDK toolkit so apps will not only by be able to run on NVIDIA but ATI GPU's too. There are some exciting changes happening now. More projects will be having NVIDIA CUDA apps soon, at least 3 more that I know of. This is the direction computing is moving to. Get on board now while the train is in the station, or get left behind.
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