Dani from the Catalunya team tells me that a group of scientists in Barcelona are running a boinc project - I don't know which one - on Playstation 3s, and the workunits are being processed much faster than on PCs. Is anyone who posts also trying this?

---

There were some attempts (e.g. the story for Seti, enjoy) - the problem was/is getting SPEs to work too.

Peter

maybe they meant this?:
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html

---

Thanks for the links. Sounds as if they're working on Folding@Home as they have it up and running and were apparently on TV in Spain describing the experiment.

---

There seems to be a BOINC-project for the PS3 now, see http://www.ps3grid.net/PS3GRID.

---

Hi Filmfreak

I think this must be the original project from Barcelona that Dani told me about. They haven't got the English translation quite right here though:

' If you like science and are happy to contribute to it, think that this technology could be disruptive for computational biology and also have important societal implications.'

I don't think it's really up and running yet. There's a member of my team listed, but only two people seem to have ever got any credit at all, and the forum doesn't work.

Can a Playstation really do as much work as 20 PCs?

---

Can a Playstation really do as much work as 20 PCs?

I'm not sure about 20, but I'm sure that in specific instances an application optimized for the PS3 could do an amazing amount of work. Just look at the FLOPS performance at Folding. Apparently the PS3s don't get the same type of work as PCs but it is still incredible.

And this PS3Grid is interesting. If it is able to bring out the full capability of the processor, it might help expedite the porting of various other BOINC projects over to PS3 as well.

---

Do adults buy Playstations? They are very large, black and shiny

http://www.ps3grid.net/PS3GRID/pdf/mundo2.pdf

but 599 Euros seems a lot of money to pay for gaming. If they are used by kids, how would one get them interested in DC? I've noticed in the past at the school where I teach that interest in Gameboys seemed negatively correlated with interest in school subjects of any sort, including science.

The article says they have one normal processor like in a PC plus I think 8 extra processors that run at amazing speed.

They've been ruled out as a way of processing cpdn climate models. I don't know whether this is because it's physically impossible, or because the model code which consists of over a million lines would have to be rewritten.

---

SETI@Home and SIMAP supports PS3, too.

For the SETI application look at this thread : http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=39910.
The SIMAP applications are available at the download site : http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/appdownloads.php

---

News from the SETI@home project : Gaurav has build a Astropulse application for the PS3 which perfoms a lot of better than the SETI applictaion. The application is available at my homepage : http://www.dotsch.de/seti

BTW, yoyo@home has also a PS3 application http://www.rechenkraft.net/yoyo/apps.php
yoyo

---

Germany biggest distributed computing community Rechenkraft.net