October 2008
Intermediate to advanced
744 pages
18h 21m
English
Content preview from Programming the Cell Processor: For Games, Graphics, and ComputationBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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1. Introducing the Cell Processor
In September 2007, the Guinness Book of World Records announced the new record holder for the world’s most powerful distributed computing system. It wasn’t a traditional cluster of high-performance computers, but a worldwide network composed of regular PCs and PlayStation 3 consoles (PS3s). Called Folding@Home, this distributed computing system simulates protein folding to analyze how diseases originate.
Before the PS3s joined in, the network was capable of only .25 petaflops (250,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second). But when the Folding@Home client started running on PS3s, the computation speed quadrupled in six months, making Folding@Home the first distributed computing system to break the ...
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