PlayStation 3Parallel Computing

Ido Tov & Matan Raveh

Parallel Processing (361-1-3621)January 2014

Electrical and Computer Engineering DPT.Ben-Gurion University

Introduction

Early 2000’s – Iraqi government bought 1000’s of PS2 NCSA (National Center for

Supercomputing Applications) built an 8 and a 32 node PS2 cluster.

Following the PlayStation 3 release: 2007 – NC State Uni. 2007 – Dartmouth Uni. (“Gravity Grid”) 2010 – USAF Research Lab for satellite

imagery (500 TFLOPS, 1760 units)

STI Cell Microprocessor

Developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBMOriginally developed for highperformance applications.

Each Cell Chip has: One PowerPC core(PPE) 8 compute cores (SPEs) On-chip Memory controller On-chip I/O On-chip network to connect them all

A PS3 has: 1 Cell Chips (6 usable SPEs) 256MB of XDR DRAM Memory Gigabit Ethernet

PS3 Cell Microprocessor

Power Processing Element (PPE)

Synergistic Processing Element (SPE)

Element Interconnection Bus (EIB)

Memory System

Network Card & Graphics Card

PS3 Cell Microprocessor

Power Processing Element (PPE) The PPE is a 64 bit, "POWER Architecture“

(Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC)

Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) An SPE is a self contained vector processor (SIMD)

which acts as a co-processor

Each SPE consists of: 128 x 128 register Local Store (SRAM) DMA unit FP, LD/ST, Permute, Branch Unit (each pipelined)

PlayStation 3 Cluster

PlayStation 3 Cluster

Parallel processing on the PS3 was enabled with the Terra Soft Solutions version of “Yellow Dog” Linux for the PlayStation 3 (2007).

This gave us the ability to work with parallel processing programing tools such as OpenMPI (for use with cluster).

Applications

Bruteforce MD5 (single PS3 cell) “Gravity Grid” – 2007 by Dr. Khanna,

made for simulating black hole’s gravity. “Folding@Home” – joined research by

Sony and Stanford Uni. for protein folding diseases (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's)

Performing the SUMMA algorithm (matrix multiplication)

Advantages and Limitations

Pricing:▪ 200GF server ~ 6000$▪ 150GF PS3 unit ~ 300$

Use of Cell Chip technology Ease of use – hardware and

software (Linux and OpenMPI) installation

Advantages

Advantages and Limitations

Main memory size: 256MB only (288MB optimal by SUMMA)

Main memory speed / access rate: causing 12.5% efficiency

Gigabit Ethernet – BOTTLENECK (compared to Cell speed)

Double Precision speed slower by factor of 14 than Single Precision

Programming Paradigm

Limitations

Sad Ending…

On March 28th 2010, Sony announced they’re disabling the ability to run other operating systems on Ps3

consoles – eliminating the option of installing Linux OS on PS consoles….

Sources

“PlayStation 3 Cluster” - Wikipedia.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

SCOP3 - A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the PlayStation 3 (Buttari, Luszczek, Kurzak, Dongarra, Bosilca, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 2007) -http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/scop3.pdf

Beyond Gaming: Programming the PS3 Cell Architecture for Cost-Effective Parallel Processing (Rabbah, IBM Watson Center, Austria 2007)

http://impact.asu.edu/cse520fa07/lec19-PS3-cell-tutorial.pdf