The PlayStation 3's Cell processor has been attracting attention recently for its impressive contribution to the Folding@Home project, where home users simulate protein folding for Stanford University's chemistry department. Now it seems Sony is thinking of renting out the same kind of capabilities to big businesses, according to The Financial Times.
Masa Chatani, chief technology officer at Sony Computer Entertainment, said in an interview with the FT on Tuesday that the company had received numerous inquiries regarding this "distributed computing" model.
"This kind of computing model could be used in a commercial application," Mr Chatani said. "For example, a start-up or a pharmaceutical company that lacks a super-computer could utilise this kind of infrastructure. We are discussing various options with companies and exploring commercial applications."
According to the F@H Client statistics by OS page, PS3s are currently contributing 269 teraflops, which compares with 21TFlops from Macs and 172TFlops from Windows machines. (It was doing even better when I last looked, a couple of weeks ago: the PS3's rating seems to have halved since then.)
Of course, the PS3 runs a very specialised client program for F@H, which basically exploits its capacity for pixel shading. However, graphics cards can do this job even better. But would the FT take equally seriously the idea of using a distributed network of PCs with ATI Radeon 1900-class graphics cards, because these appear offer far better performance than the PS3's Cell.
According to the F@H chart, only 989 GPUs (graphics processing units) are contributing 58TFlops, which appears to make each GPU roughly 4.5x more powerful than a PS3 for this particular purpose. Indeed, perhaps the ATI processor in the Xbox 360 -- which also has 48 pixel shaders -- could do better than the PS3, too.
Of course, the F@H chart is not an accurate indicator of the actual power of any machine or network: it's based on the amount of work done. You can halve the apparent power of a system by turning it off half the time, or reduce it dramatically by running other software. The relative contribution of the PS3 to F@H may therefore fall if Sony launches a few decent games and/or some more affordable Blu-ray movies come out.
If Sony goes ahead, this raises the amusing prospect of some pharmaceutical company having to go to a government regulator and say: "Sorry, we couldn't file out data on time because the new Spiderman movie crippled our supercomputer."
