Physicist Builds Supercomputer From Old PlayStations

Gaurav-Khanna-With-His-Supercomputer-at-Massachusetts-University — Gaurav Khanna with his indigenous supercomputer at University of Massachusetts

Your PlayStations are more powerful than you could ever think. I think we established this fact when NASA told us that the most famous space probe of this generation New Horizons uses the tweaked version of the CPU of your Original PlayStation. Another genius had used the PlayStation power to build a Supercomputer for himself.

A Black Hole physicist from the University of Massachusetts, Gaurav Khanna has built a powerful supercomputer from his PlayStation (PS3) console to help himself in his research on Black Holes. Gaurav aims to find the curvature of the gravitational waves in space-time due to some violent astrophysical event such as the collision of two black holes.

Well, the calculations exceeded the limit of a regular computer and Khanna soon felt the need for a better machine. Since a supercomputer costs a fortune, so he decided to build one. Supercomputers work on the general principle of interlinking many computers together to a single network and Gaurav applied the same principle to PlayStations (PS3).

The University linked 16 Sony PlayStation consoles over the Internet and powered them with Linux. We already know 496 of the top 500 supercomputers of the world use Linux. Thus, a make-shift supercomputer was built that had the processing speed increased almost by a factor of 10.

Gaurav had used his indigenous supercomputer to model his research and published the results in the journal Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems in 2009. Since then, he has developed more powerful supercomputer for himself.

US Air Force followed Khanna’s technique and built their own supercomputer using 1,760 gaming consoles to process radar image surveillance in 2010. The US Department of Defense later gifted 176 PS3 consoles to Khanna and the University.

He revealed his plans to build another supercomputer using PC graphic cards. This supercomputer would supposedly be as powerful as a computer built by 20 PS3s.

Now that is called a genius!

Get best deals of 2015 on drones, coding, VPN’s and more at fossBytes store.