[Beowulf] coprocessor to do "physics calculations"

[Nathan Moore]

This has been done - sort of.
(http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/cluster.php)
  One of the national labs built a cluster of ~70 Sony PlayStation  
2's a few years back and tried to do Molecular Dynamics on them - not  
sure if it was viable successful, but Mercury seems to be trying the  
same thing with the Cell chip.  (http://www.mc.com/cell/)

Not sure I'd want to program for 8 cores though...

Nathan Moore, PhD
Assistant Professor, Physics
Winona State University
AIM:nmoorewsu
skype:nathanmoore78
nmoore at winona.edu



On May 5, 2006, at 8:04 AM, Todd wrote:

> On that note. - I wonder what the throughput would measure if one  
> where able
> to cluster a bunch of Xboxes running linux.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf- 
> bounces at beowulf.org] On
> Behalf Of Bill Broadley
> Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 9:25 PM
> To: Jim Lux
> Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] coprocessor to do "physics calculations"
>
> On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 01:09:07PM -0700, Jim Lux wrote:
>> Ran across an interesting device:
>> http://physx.ageia.com/
>>
>> It's some sort of coprocessor (marketed to the gaming community) that
>> looks like its designed to efficiently numerically integrate  
>> equations
>> of motion.  Clever idea.  Not much substantive info in the  
>> whitepaper.
>> http://physx.ageia.com/whitepaper_avanced_gaming_physics.pdf
>
> Anyone know if it can handle double precision floating point?
>
> --
> Bill Broadley
> Computational Science and Engineering
> UC Davis
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