Ido Tov & Matan Raveh Parallel Processing ( ) January 2014 Electrical and Computer Engineering DPT. Ben-Gurion University

 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)

 Developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM Originally developed for high performance 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

 Power Processing Element (PPE)  Synergistic Processing Element (SPE)  Element Interconnection Bus (EIB)  Memory System  Network Card & Graphics Card

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)

 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).

 Bruteforce MD5 (single PS3 cell)  “Gravity Grid” – 2007 by Dr. Khanna, made for simulating black hole’s gravity.  – 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

On March 28 th 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….

“PlayStation 3 Cluster” - Wikipedia.com SCOP3 - A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the PlayStation 3 (Buttari, Luszczek, Kurzak, Dongarra, Bosilca, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 2007) Beyond Gaming: Programming the PS3 Cell Architecture for Cost-Effective Parallel Processing (Rabbah, IBM Watson Center, Austria 2007)