this is just amazing....
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer
Yeah, I saw that. Must have been a nightmare to program, though - coding for one Cell is hard enough, but coding for eight... :o.
It's awesome.
I now know that the Playstation 3 can run on Linux and I saw a topic regarding Terragen 2 running in Linux.
Does this mean that it may be possible to make Terragen 2 force the Playstation 3 to render through Linux?
My TV is broken anyway, so I must find some other use for my PS3.
This story is getting a lot of press, but the term "supercomputer" doesn't really have a lot of meaning when used like this. It's a cool approach to be sure, and PS3's (the Cell CPU basically) are indeed very useful for this kind of thing. Sony is selling them at a loss so it's a deal (unlike pretty much any other computer hardware you can find). But they're also, as o_b said, a pain in the ass to actually take advantage of, unless your task just happens to map very well to the Cell way of doing things. You're not likely to see TG2 on Cell/PS3 any time soon at any rate...
- Oshyan