SI: Interview with Dr. Gaurav Khana, A Pioneer In The PS3 Supercomputing Field

[Christopher]

Dr. Gaurav Khana is a brilliant Astrophysicist from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth who works on different problems in theoretical and computational astrophysics. To assist him on some of his processor intensive work, he has built a supercomputing cluster out of 16 PS3?s called the gravity PS3 Gravity Grid. He is a pioneer in the PS3 supercomputing field, and his shared his knowledge on building clusters at ps3cluster.org.

I had a chance to interview Dr. Khana, and we talked about how this all got started, cluster speed and his thoughts on the lack of OtherOS support in the revamped PS3 line. Immense thanks to Dr. Khana for being extremely personable, easy to talk to and for answering all of our questions

Being one of the pioneers in this PS3 cluster field, how do you think using the PS3 in this way has changed the landscape of research?

The PS3 has definitely significantly impacted various areas of computation-based research. Perhaps the best example of this is Stanford’s Folding@Home project that is nearing 10 petaflops, of which PS3s contribute an important fraction. And then there are dozens of small clusters at various universities like mine.

In my case in particular, I have been able to do calculations that I simply couldn’t do before. And that makes the whole approach invaluable to me, of course. But beyond what I have been able to do, the thought that one should seriously evaluate commodity gaming hardware (consoles and graphics cards) for high-performance scientific computing is leading towards a transformation of the supercomputing industry.

Prior to being able to utilize the PS3, how you were able to accomplish your research?

Academic researchers in the US have access to supercomputing facilities through various federal agencies (such as the NSF, NASA etc). To obtain supercomputing time, one submits a proposal to the federal agency, which is peer-reviewed and prioritized. Alternatively, one can rent supercomputers at the rate of $1 per CPU per hour. To give you an idea, a single black hole research simulation of interest to me, can take 5,000 — 10,000 CPU-hours. And to explore a problem in depth, one would want to do several dozen such simulations, at the very least!

Yes, I have used such facilities before for my black hole astrophysics research and continue to do so. They are an awesome resource and are managed very well. But, since they are heavily shared facilities they often have long queues and strong restrictions on their usage. I realized that for a specific, computationally intensive, black hole research problem that I was working on, I simply did not have the supercomputing time available to me for a thorough study. It was mainly for this reason, I started looking into “creative”