Friday, 23 May 2003
NCSA's PS2 cluster got mentioned on Slashdot. The Pablo group, of which I'm a member, has been working on PS2 stuff for the past few months. (I'm not involved; I just hear about it at meetings.) Getting random scientific applications to run on it is not easy, between single-precision floating-point, data layout issues, constrained memory, and horrendously slow disk and network I/O. Not that we expect to get real work done on the cluster: it's primarily a proof of concept for HPC work on later generations of gaming hardware.
Pavan Tumati's pioneering work on porting computational chemistry to the PS2 is mentioned as well. As is, he's done a lot in his free time, much more than we have with an actual funded project. 
8:57 PM
