The PlayStation 3 for high-performance scientific computing

PlayStation 3, a Cell processor, can significantly impact the high-performance computing world with its unique potential. It is expected to be the cheapest Cell-based system on the market, and contains a Cell processor, 256 Mbytes of main memory, an NVIDIA graphics card with 256 Mbytes of its own memory, and a giga-bit Ethernet (GigE) network card. The Cell processor in the PlayStation 3 is identical to the one in high-end IBM or Mercury blade severs, with the exception that the two SPEs are not available. The GigE card is accessible to the Linux kernel through the hypervisor, which both makes it possible to turn the PlayStation 3 into a networked station and facilitates building PlayStation 3 clusters through network switches. All Linux distributions for the PlayStation 3 also come with the standard GNU compiler suite, including C (GCC), C++ (G++), and Fortran 95 (GFORTRAN), which provide support for OpenMP through the GNU GOMP library.