[HN Gopher] NCSA creates Sony PlayStation2 cluster (2003)
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NCSA creates Sony PlayStation2 cluster (2003)
Author : marcodiego
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-12-22 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ncsa30.ncsa.illinois.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (ncsa30.ncsa.illinois.edu)
| dehrmann wrote:
| It's interesting how this trend died off so hard. I'm guessing
| what drove it was people buying into Sony's marketing hype (so
| powerful you can't export to Iraq!) and trying to get some halo
| hype, yourself. What killed it was the clusters being a hassle to
| manage and use, limited longevity, consoles moving to commodity
| hardware (hah! Xbox was already there), and OpenCL/CUDA and the
| rise of the GPU.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I don't think the trend really died. This helped show the power
| of dedicated vector processors, and happened to coincide with
| commodity video cards with the same sort of processors being
| more widely-available. There was a brief window where buying a
| whole PS2 just to get the vector processors was the most cost-
| effective solution, but the market quickly adjusted to fill
| that niche in a better way. This was a spike, and then they
| implemented the real thing.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Apple also ran this ad for the Power Mac G4:
| https://youtu.be/t4dDuocAXTY
| j_halden wrote:
| Yeah the PS3 clusters were much more news worthy as the cell
| broadband engine cost 1.5 thousand dollars at the time as a PCIe
| card.
| klodolph wrote:
| Back from the era when MIPS was exciting. The PlayStation 2 has a
| 64-bit MIPS III processor (with some MIPS IV stuff), which was
| really cool before x86 ate the world. You can still see support
| for the PlayStation 2 in GCC + Binutils (unlike the PlayStation
| or Nintendo 64... even though those systems both both have MIPS
| II or MIPS III processors, they aren't really big enough to run a
| more modern OS comfortably, and don't have Ethernet).
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Not sure where new MIPS CPUs are used nowadays, but i do have a
| handheld[0] that uses a MIPS-based CPU (Ingenic JZ4770) at 1GHz
| with 512MB of RAM and a 3D accelerator using an open source
| Linux-based OS. This is from 2013-2014 but there have been some
| more recent clones, like the RG350 series by Anbernic[2] (which
| runs the same OS and software).
|
| Though it is basically just a Linux system, nothing special
| about it aside from the instruction set. When i ported a DOS
| game i made some time ago to it[3] all i did was install Debian
| and Free Pascal on a MIPS QEMU system, make sure it compiles
| with SDL and package the binary in the package format its
| launcher uses (OPK, which IIRC is essentially a squashfs
| image).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCW_Zero
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenic_Semiconductor
|
| [2] https://retrododo.com/rg350/
|
| [3] https://i.imgur.com/coFBWXx.jpg
| dehrmann wrote:
| > they aren't really big enough to run a more modern OS
| comfortably
|
| I'm sure there are a few asterisks to this, but the WRT54G (the
| iconic Linksys blue and black wifi router) has a MIPS 32-bit
| CPU that's ~4x as fast as the PSX and ~1/2x as fast as the PS2.
| zokier wrote:
| Well, modern OpenWRT doesn't run on original WRT54G at all,
| and barely on the upgraded WRT54GS version, so there is that.
|
| 32MB of RAM that the PS2 had would be really tight for modern
| kernels.
|
| https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/432_warning
|
| But CPU-wise I don't foresee that ~300MHz MIPS would be any
| sort of major roadblock.
| mobilio wrote:
| Currently OpenWrt uses Kernel 5.10 or 5.4.
|
| When WRT54G was available kernel was 2.2 or 2.4
| marderfarker2 wrote:
| My mind is blown. Especially when knowing my WRT54G would
| buckle if you so much as send it more than a dozen ICMP
| packets per second.
| klodolph wrote:
| The 4x that's important is that the smallest iteration of the
| WRT54G still has 4x as much RAM as a PlayStation. The CPU
| speed is enough, to be sure. Newer versions of OpenWrt or
| Linux are going to have problems with such a small amount of
| RAM. Note that it's definitely _possible,_ it's just not
| _comfortable._
| duskwuff wrote:
| The limiting factor on the PS1 would have been RAM. It only
| had 2 MB -- the WRT54G had 16 MB.
| branon wrote:
| Is there a way to stop web pages from hijacking my browser's
| scroll behavior?
|
| Nice article though.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I built a 100-node mini-supercomputer at ASU back in 2002/2003,
| to process image data from the Mars rovers (MER), Mars Odyssey,
| and other NASA missions. We ended up using regular dual-CPU AMD
| systems racked up, running the same PBS/Maui batch-processing
| software mentioned in this article. I remember there was some
| discussion of and interest in this cluster at the time, but we
| didn't have the in-house expertise to redesign our software
| (mostly old USGS systems written in Fortran, some dating back to
| the Apollo era) to take advantage of the vector processors. As
| the article mentions, this was more of a proof-of-concept than a
| serious workhorse, but the ideas lived on.
| peter-m80 wrote:
| Related:
|
| US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3's to build
| supercomputer https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-
| playstation-3s-supercomput...
| Wingman4l7 wrote:
| Yep, was confused for a minute -- all the Beowulf cluster hype
| I remember was around the PS _3_. Sony even got sued for later
| removing the ability to put Linux on it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
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