The Sony Playstation 3 has been a massive help to the people at Folding@Home, who are using distributed computing – networking multiple willing computers across the globe to complete intensive simulations – to help understand diseases such as Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s.
The PS3 allows owners to use their console as a massive distributed computer, using its awesome power to help.
Well it looks as if science as a whole is beginning to reap the rewards of the super powerful game consoles out on the market.
Leading scientists are now using the PS3 console as a mini supercomputer to do their sums and simulate everything from colliding black holes to the effects of drugs. This is all due to the fact that the graphics that a PS3 is displaying up on your TV screen are powered by calculations that measure up to those being run on supercomputers.
But consider the amount of time you have to wait to get your chance on a supercomputer, compared to just hooking up an array of 16 PS3’s, like Prof Gaurav Khanna at the University of Massachusetts has done. Khanna is hoping to calculate what will happen when two black holes merge; using a game console!
"There is no doubt that the entertainment industry is helping to drive the direction of high performance computational science - exploiting the power available to the masses will lead to many research breakthroughs in the future," comments Prof Peter Coveney of University College London, who uses supercomputing in chemistry.
The PS3 is one of the most popular considering that its Cell processor, dubbed a “supercomputer on a chip” is literally just that. In addition, the PS3 runs on Linux, which allows programmers endless possibilities that would not be available on a Windows based machine.
"A single high-precision simulation can sometimes cost more than 5,000 hours on the TeraGrid supercomputers. For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer using PS3s. It works just as well, has no long wait times and can be used over and over again, indefinitely," Prof Khanna says.
Todd Martinez too has joined the legion of PS3 devotees in the arena of science, persuading the supercomputing center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to buy eight computers each driven by two of the “supercomputer chips.”
He was inspired by his own sons PS3, when he decided to take a look at the game console’s technical specifications. "I noticed that the architecture looked a lot like high performance supercomputers I had seen before," he says. "That's when I thought about getting one for myself."
And reports saying that the Nintendo Wii is being used to help doctors limber up for surgery, with its motion tracking sensors, takes us down an entirely different road of how video consoles are helping out. Neurologist Thomas Davis at the Vanderbilt Medical Centre in Nashville, Tennessee, is using the Wii to measure deficiencies in patients suffering from Parkinson’s, to determine how a certain drug trial is helping them with their movement.
All in all, one can be happy that with science behind us now, our endless hours playing video games are now entirely justifiable. Maybe.
Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.
