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SUPERCOMPUTERS FROM GAME STATIONS

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from a group of Sony PlayStation 2 devices. Researchers at the supercomputing center believe the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second, well within the definition of supercomputer.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open-source Linux operating system, is that the only hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the individual game machines in a rack and plugging them together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch.

The scientists are taking advantage of a standard component of the PS2 that was originally intended to move and transform pixels rapidly on a television screen to produce lifelike graphics. That chip is not the PlayStation 2's MIPS microprocessor, but rather a graphics co-processor known as the Emotion Engine. That custom-designed silicon chip is capable of producing up to 6.5 billion mathematical operations a second.

The impressive performance of the game machine, which has been on the market for a few years, underscores a radical shift that has taken place in the computing world since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s.

While the most advanced computing technologies have historically been developed first for large corporate users and military contractors, increasingly the fastest computers are being developed for the consumer market.

The pace of the consumer computing world is moving so quickly that the researchers are building the PlayStation 2-based supercomputer as an experiment to see how quickly they can take advantage of off-the-shelf, low- cost technologies.

Despite the computing promise of game consoles that sell for less than $200, the researchers acknowledged that the experiment was likely to be most useful for a group of relatively narrow scientific problems.

While the system was already doing scientific calculations, researchers say they cannot be certain about its ultimate computing potential.