Great news for those PlayStation enthusiasts who intend to do more than just play games with their PS3… The PS3 console can now be used as a high performance computing platform.
In one of its releases, Mercury Systems said that it has unveiled “MultiCore Plus SDK for PS3 – Base Packageâ€. Provided you have more than just casual development experience, the product and services giant promises that the kit offers the tools to increase processing power of the Cell processor in an “affordable†way and simplify the transition to multi-core programming for developers.
According to the company, the SDK will run Linux on the PS3 without overhead, data movement and computation automatically, and fine-tune application performance. The $399 (approx 16100 INR) per seat software includes a trace analysis tool, which monitors dynamic multiprocessor and multi-core interactions and detects performance bottlenecks and visualizes deadlocks (both functions require an x86 PC as host.)
Retail market pricing for the forthcoming “MultiCore Plus SDK for PS3 – Scientific Algorithm Library Add-on Package†is not made known yet. But all the same, Mercury promises that the software will include “over 600 functions for use in compute intensive applications†and “also a huge number of image and signal processing functions optimized specifically for the Cell architecture.â€
The PlayStation 3 has been a product of interest as far as third party applications are concerned, ever since its release in November, 2006. The Folding@Home PS3 project, announced back in March of this year, is easily one of the most popular supercomputing uses for the platform.
