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The Sony PlayStation 3 is no longer just for letting you pretend to be the Beatles in ‘Rock Band,’ or fight in alien ring-worlds in ‘Halo.’
Thanks to the work of a pair of researchers in Ireland, the PS3 is the latest piece of hardware to get on the grid. They’re using a mini-cluster of PS3s to run software that can screen for new and potentially life-saving drugs.
And all for a price tag of less than $350 (about 250€) per machine.
Eamonn Kenny, the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project’s Portability Coordinator, and Peter Lavin, a grad student at Trinity College Dublin, ported the EGEE-supported gLite middleware — specifically the worker node software that performs the majority of the computational work on the grid — to eight connected PlayStation 3’s.
“We want to prove that the gLite software is robust enough to work on another architecture,” said Kenny.
They became interested in doing this upon hearing that other large software ran well on PlayStation 3, a machine with seven Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs).
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