Why is the U.S. military buying PS3?

a bit of an identity crisis today. Who is Yeah, so, um, we are going to talk about some some very strange combinations of things actually, uh one that you might not expect gaming and super computing, super super computing. Yeah. This actually comes a courtesy of a little listener text message Liz, queue something up, will you? This text message comes from Tim who says, what's up with the U. S. Army

buying p S three's for a parallel supercomputer cloud system? Question? Mark? Well, Tim, first of all, it's not the U. S. Army, it's the US Air Force. And it wasn't twenty two hundred p S three's It was actually twenty five hundred. But uh, yeah, we get the point of the question here, which is what is up with buying p S three's and how does that make a supercomputer? It all boils down to the PlayStation three's processor, which is a cell processor. Yes,

this is a custom chip. UM actually spent quite a lot of money in in development and it was under development by a joint venture of three companies. In addition to Sony, IBM and Toshiba were both involved with this with this chips manufacturer. And uh, it's a pretty interesting device. It's what gives the p S three it's mph and uh, you know, allows it to do what it can do.

It can crunch lots and lots of numbers, right, and so let's uh, let's just do a quick overview of what a processor does and then we talk about why the the cell processor is slightly different. So, in general, a processor's job is to take a uh information, So it's taking data and executing any sort of function upon that data to get a result. So there are two different lines of data going into a processor at any

one time. There's the source information and then there are there the the the functions, the various code that comes in and says, all right, add these numbers together, or divide this number, or find the uh the largest two prime integers of this number. Um. And so that's what a processor does, is it It It executes the command upon the data and then gives the result. Uh. So that's the basic function of a processor. Now the cell

processor is a little different. It's it's kind of a specialized processor and uh it has a cup of different elements to it that allow it to behave in a slightly different way. Um. In a way, it actually kind of acts like multiple computers working together on a single problem. It's just it's all been consolidated onto a single processor chip. Now, this processor chip has a power processor element or p p E. The power processor elements job is kind of like a manager at uh in a in an office,

all right. The manager's job is they take in an assignment and then they give that they delegate that assignment to an employee complete all right, and then uh that employee would be represented by a synergistic processor element or SPE. Now the PS three cell processors have a one PPE and seven SPEs. So the PPE takes the problem, divides it up into individual tasks, and gives each task to an SPE. Each SPE is able to work as its own processor, with all of them working together in concert.

You have a very powerful chip because they are all. That means all seven of these can work towards solving each individual problem, which ultimately will solve a much larger problem. Uh in in a fraction of the time of what would take a similarly powerful single core processor. Okay, So the other way that the analogy I used I use this on an episode of Tech Stuff Live not too long ago. But imagine that you have two rooms. Inside one room, you've got a mathematician genius, someone who can

take a math problem and solve it. Uh It doesn't matter how complex you make it. Eventually, sooner or later, this genius will figure it out. In a second room, you have a room full of smart people who are good at math. But they are not mathematicians. They are not geniuses. They're just they're diligent and they work hard and they can get the right answer. It just usually takes them a little bit longer than it would the genius in the other room. Now, let's say you've got

a math problem. The math problem is a really really long problem that can be broken down into several steps, And you give the math problem to the genius, and you give the math problem to the room full of smart people. The smart people can break that problem up into lots of smaller problems, and each person is working on a section of it, and then ultimately they can put all their answers together and solve it faster than

the genius can. However, if you have a big problem that cannot be broken down, the genius is going to be able to work through that problem faster because no matter how you, how how much the smart people in the other room look at it, they can't break that problem into smaller pieces to solve each on their own. So they just have to work on it and get through the problem. That they're not gonna be any faster

than the other guy in the other room. So that's that's kind of a comparison of a cell processor versus a very powerful, uh regular microprocessor. Uh. It all depends on the kind of information you feed into it. If it's the kind of information that can be broken down into smaller problems, you're set. You're going to be able to solve that in in no time flat, relatively speaking, because you can do something that's called parallel processing. All

the processors are working in parallel. Awesome. Wow, I'm I'm already wiped out. We haven't even gotten to the part about the US Air Force. Now, the Air Force is not actually they're not. It's not the first organization to use PS three's as a supercomputer. Yeah. As a matter of fact, um Sony was trying to illustrate this as

far back as two thousand six. Um they have been uh promoting the idea that the cell processor is capable of handling advanced computing UM basically as an if you will, as sort of a marketing effort, although sort of an unusual one by you know, I guess most aiming console standards, but it's it's basically a marketing effort to show, look, this is this processor is so advanced it can handle serious computing stuff, not just handle your games. It's not just a Blu ray player. It really is a super

heavy duty monster of a chip. And um, they actually have been very uh cooperative with people who are are trying to build them into and network them together to make a super computer as um as certain uh researcher did up in the Northeastern United States. Are you familiar with this person? This is the astrophysicist Dr Garov Kana. Yes. Dr Kanna, who who networked eight PlayStation three's together originally in order to solve problems relating to gravitational fields and

things of that nature. Yeah, he called it his gravity

grid according to the research that I used. UM. And basically, what he wanted to do was to find out, uh, what would happen if a supermassive black ol swallows a star, And so he wanted he really needed massive amounts of computing ability to do that, and he had been spending money that he he was receiving as grants from the National Science Foundation UM to distribute his project out to supercomputers, but that was costing about five thousand dollars a pop.

And UM, he realized that he could do this more affordably with the processors inside a PlayStation three if he networked them together and also installed Lennox. That's an important element of this is that they Sony actually allows people to install and an open source operating system onto the p S three if they want to. It's it's actually allowed. Um, there's no barrier in place, which I gotta say is

really weird for Sony. I mean, Sony is not known for being the most open platform kind of company, but um, yeah, by installing lenox and creating a cluster of these PS three's. You have this very power full processing machine. What that that is? Uh, that's one illustration of how behind this project Sony is. But I haven't a more even uh vivid thing because see Dr Kano figured it would take about to buy the PlayStation three and this was you know, a couple of years ago. They were still more they

were more expensive than since then. Um, but he was able to talk Sony. He explained to Sony what he wanted to do, and Sony Sony donated the eight machines that he needed to create his gravity grid. So they were absolutely saying yeah and are absolutely so, um, you know they were. They were totally behind it, and it made some noise at the time, which was good because at the time Sony was having some difficulties selling them

because they were very expensive. And so when you know, I was talking earlier about the the one PPE handing out the the the individual jobs to the sp s. The same thing can be said. If you Clu suster these these devices together, you just you become you create an even larger group. So it's like a group of managers and a group of employees and so uh, you effectively increase the processing ability of this these machines, you know, by however many you managed to network together, and you

can network lots of these together. You don't. It doesn't have to just be eight. That was the size of the cluster that um Dr Khanna decided to to go with. But uh, and it admit the processing needs that you had at the time. The US Air Force is doing a similar project. You know, we were talking abouts threes. It's actually closer to undred. They already had over three hundred uh already set aside for supercomputing. But it's the

same sort of concept is linking these together. You install Linux on them, you create clusters, and using these clusters you can solve really complex problems and and and parallel problems. Again, once again we have to differentiate. Um has to be a complex parallel problem for these clusters to actually be effective. This is very similar in a way to what quantum computing promises us. You may remember we talked about quantum computing in a previous podcast. Actually we may have talked

about a couple of times. But quantum computers use cubits rather than just regular bits, and a cubit can be a zero or a one, or theoretically anything in between at the same time, so you are able to do multiple You're able to execute multiple processes all at once because these cubits are fulfilling all possibilities at the same time.

The difference between quantum computers and networking a bunch of p S three's together is the results from a quantum computer are going to be generated in probabilities, so you get you'll get maybe a range of potential answers with a percentage of how likely each one is correct, so you'll never be certain that the answer that has the highest percentage, you know, the highest probability of being correct, is in fact the really correct one, which is kind

of weird, but that's quantum for you. Yeah, probably, yeah. Um. You know it's funny too because, just as an aside, every time somebody says cubits, I think of the the length measurements, not which is cub i T you're thinking about building an arc, Well, yeah, everybody thinks of the arc, probably because of the Bill Cosby bit. What the hell is a cubit? Yeah, but now these are q bits, Yeah, which is an entirely different. Animals say a distant cousin

to q Bert. Right. UM. That amazes me. That's why I bring up Cubert as often as possible. The Air Force is actually going to be using this cluster to test a way of processing multiple radar images. Basically, they want to build them into fire resolution versions of those images UM, and other projects including high definition video processing. UM.

You know, pretty heavy stuff. UM. But you know it requires that much processing power and it actually apparently is going to be handled at the Air Force Reach Research Laboratories Information Center in Rome, New York. So. UM, it's a very very specialized unit. It sounds like from the from the descriptions I've read, UM. But what's really interesting is you can do this yourself if you are. I was wondering if we were going to go into the

how too, because this is this gets kind of complicated. No, I wasn't going to go in depth into the how to, but I was going to point out that uh Dr Khanna and another UM, the U Mass Dartmouth Principal investigator H. Chris Poulin, have a guide available to It's free, it's

open source. All you need to do is go to PS three cluster dot org and you can find out how to build your on PlayStation three uh cluster computer, and they even tell you how you can still play games on it, although it does require a special boot system in order to boot back into the regular proprietary PS three operating system, which is very very cool. Yeah, so in general, I can run through like the high level steps because we can't really get into the details.

It's really really complicated. Well, yeah, I'm not sure that anybody is going to take the podcast and yeah, but just just so you kind of get an idea of what goes into this is that you you have to be able to uh get a particular they they recommend a specific Linux distribution that you then uh you uh image onto a DVD and you use that as a part of what you're going to do for the the

operating system for the Sony PS three. You also have to have a USB memory stick to get a special boot command on that um uh you put the image of that on there. They actually host that file on the site itself, and you using these together, you can go into a Sony PlayStation three menu and there's actually a choice to um switch the operating system to other So you I mean, it's built in you can change

it that way. I mean that shows you that Sony was thinking ahead and was being very accommodating to this kind of hacking. Um, and we're using hacking in the uh, not not in the malicious sense, but in the hey, let's make this thing that does this particular task do something totally unrelated, which is really cool. Let's take it

apart and see what else we can make it. So you has they have steps for installing Linux onto the machine, which is actually it's a multi step process, um and it it might be a little intimidating, but if you actually follow the instructions that are on the website, they're

very comprehensive and they you know you don't. It's one of those things where it's better if you do know everything, like the reasons why you are are going through these steps, but it's not necessary because they tell you what to do anyway, so you could just blindly follow the steps and as long as you do that, you should be

all right. And uh. After you've installed Lenox, it's time to create something called the message passing interface, which is that's the way that it it processes information and networks information. And you also have to get the uh software Developer Kit, so that you can actually make it do whatever it is that you plan on having it do, whether that's search for intelligent life or plot thermonuclear war. I mean, it's really up to you basically at that point, it's

just a tool. It's not that you know, it's not gonna run your games better, let me put it that way. You're not gonna suddenly see and improve performance from your p S three as far as gaming is concerned. But you can use it as a very powerful computer. And if you have a particular project that requires parallel processing and that's a lot of ps. Yeah, that thing we've got a pop filed are here. Um. But if you if you happen to have that that need, this could

be a resource for you, especially now that the prices dropped. Um. And it's that's it's kind of interesting too that it's gained so much traction as an idea to use the PlayStation three as a model for the or and I guess a unit to be built into a cluster UM. The Cluster Workshop project, the one that we're just talking about, is as now partially funded by the National Science Foundation. UM. So it's you know, it's received that level of support

in the scientific community. So um, and from what I could tell, it looks like a lot of people have adopted the idea. Um, it's just one of those things where when the military goes out and buys a whole lot of game consoles and networked into a cluster computer. It's it's it makes headlines because it's an interesting story.

Well yeah, and when you think about it, having to submit that budget request up the chain of command to the point where you know ultimately it's going to go to some sort of politicians, it can be a challenge to explain to someone not it's not not I don't want to use the word savvy, but not particularly informed about the possibility of of networking these devices together in order to make an actual computer. Uh. You know, on the surface, you just say, why the heck do you

want video game consoles? Uh? So, I mean that would definitely be a challenge. I would not want to be the guy who has to explain, especially if if I were in a chain of command situation, I might not even understand it. You know, it might be like three people below me have have that information and then I'm kind of stuck. But that is It is a nice interesting way to solve the problem because supercomputers are not just expensive. I mean, not all research facilities purchase supercomputers.

In fact, most don't. Most end up essentially, um not not renting time, but getting having to I'm granted to them to use a supercomputer, either through grant money or sometimes the supercomputer, uh resource has a quota to meet of a certain number of hours of processing time they have to dedicate to research projects. But you've got you've got more projects, and you have supercomputers, so you know

that time becomes a precious commodity. And if you if you aren't able to book that time when your research project is active, then it could be really hard to keep that project going long enough for you to be able to get the access. So this is a really it's a viable alternative. Yeah. Yeah, And another nice thing too is that, you know, it's one of the things that keeps Google's data centers running. Mean, they use thousands and thousands of computers as servers. You know, if one

of them goes down, there's some redundancy. So I would assume although I you know, it's just one of those things that just came to me I haven't researched it, but I would assume if one of the PlayStations, um, you know, gives up the ghost, then you could pull it out and you know, put another machine in there far more affordably than you could if you're a supercomputer, you know, your crazy definitely, definitely, because you're talking about

you know, off the shelf components versus sometimes uh very specific um unique parts. I mean, some of these supercomputers are running on chips that you know, they essentially come out of the lab and go into a supercomputer, so they're not even at the mass production phase necessarily for some of these chips, whereas with the p S three you just go to best Buy or you know something and just pick one off the shelf and go and

you buy it and you're done. You have to go back and you you know, you have to of course install the operating system and and and attach it to your cluster part of the cluster. It's not like it's just plug in play. But it's a lot easier than if you suddenly had your supercomputer go oopsie on you. Yeah, not that I've ever heard of a PlayStation three having that kind of a problem. Now that's more of an

Xbox three sixty kind of thing. See, now people are gonna write to me and say that I hate the Xbox three six, despite the fact that I am an avid Xbox fan. But come on, guys, that red ring of death. Seriously. Oh you know, I I wouldn't mind having. I don't own either one, and I would like at PlayStation three and an Xbox reason so would I put it on my Amazon wish list, And no one has picked it up yet. I keep checking. Well, you know, look in your stocking. We'll see what we can do.

And I have been gaining a lot of weight. My stocking has been getting larger, Leon is getting larger. Well, I guess, uh, that's a good discussion about the p S three supercomputer connection. Um, that was a great question, Tim. He actually he actually, Although I said it was a listener text message, he sent his request via phone, which a lot of you have been doing. And it just shows that our listeners are super cool smartphone users, which

is awesome. Um. Well, I guess that wraps up that discussion, but it does lead us to a little listener mail. This listener mail comes from Immanual Emmanuel says, Hey, they're imitating Jonathan because you guys are awesome. Thank you. You guys mentioned that NATAL uses only gestures and it is unsure of whether it will be too much of a

leap in technology. However, one thing you forgot to mention is that NATAL can actually scan physical objects, which then allows you to use real world objects in your games. This can range from skateboards, tennis rackets, to an air soft gun for first person shoots, etcetera. In my humble opinion, the developers are really in control of whether or not their game will implement some sort of physical object. The only way to find out is to wait until the

release date. We shall see. I'm Emmanuel from Bermuda and this is my okay. Now, this was a request from Immanual. So anyone who gets annoyed by me yelling into the microphone, this is your opportunity. Turned down the volume now, okay, I'm going to count to three, and after that I'm gonna fulfill Emmanual's requests. Remember this is a manual asking for this, so please turn down your volume one, two, three. Listener Maid in the tone that you used to use

because it always managed to make me laugh. Thanks Emmanuel, I hope you guys were able to turn your volume down in time. Don't send me iTunes reviews and say that you hated it. I gave you plenty of opportunity that time, guys. You know, I have to say it's it's funny because, um, both sides are pretty vocal about whether they liked or hated that. Yeah, we get email all the time about people who say, thank you for changing that, that was irritating, or I really miss the

way you used to say listener mail. And then we still get reviews on iTunes that say I hate how he yells into the microphone, Like I haven't done that for like three months anyway, So I guess they're just listening to all the old episodes. Thanks a lot, Emanuel. That is a good point. Yes, Natal can scan objects like like a skateboard. So it's kind of similar to the Tony Hawk Ride game that came mount where you have a very special controller that's in the shape of

a skateboard. Use that as a controller. Why are you looking at me like that? Nothing? So anyway, you can scan like a board and use it as if it were one of those controllers. Now, granted the board you scan would just be a normal board. It wouldn't even have any controls in it or anything. It's an't all scanning it and then interpreting that. So when I said that you would have to use like just your empty hand for like a lightsaber game, I totally forgot. No,

you don't necessarily have to do that. It may allow you to scan an object and use that as the hilt of a lightsaber, which could then help you defeat the forces of evil, or if you are like me, make everyone join the empire. I have a plus three slice of pizza. Fear me. Okay, now you're mixing genres and and different kinds of games. I'm gonna have to close this out. If any of you would like to send us mail, our address is tex Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Remember we got a live show,

tech Stuff Live every Tuesday one pm Eastern. You can find a link to that through the blogs and the blog links are on how stuff works dot com on the right hand side and Crispy and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house, Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you