Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Saturday August 08 2015, @04:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the faster-processing-of-cat-pictures dept.

The same professor who received national attention for discovering that PlayStation 3 (PS3) technology could be configured into low-cost supercomputers has now demonstrated that the processor found in hundreds of millions of cell phones has enormous scientific computing potential. The impact of this discovery could have far-reaching impacts for scientists around the world, who have a wealth of curiosity and ingenuity but sometimes lack access to expensive standard supercomputing technology.

"It is about making supercomputing more accessible to scientists, mainly through offering very highly cost-effective alternatives," said UMass Dartmouth Associate Professor Dr. Gaurav Khanna, who serves as Associate Director of the fast emerging Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research (CSCVR). "Bottom-line, supercomputers need to be more power efficient and perform well using much less electricity. And that is an area where smartphones have done very well. Improving battery technology is hard, but improving the efficiency of chips found in most smart phones is much easier."

Global technology companies such as Qualcomm, Apple, and Nvidia have been making mobile phone chips more and more power-efficient according to Dr. Khanna and thus offering people a better experience on their phones even though they have the same battery technology.

"Consumer demand for better performance and longer lasting battery life have pushed technological innovation in the consumer mobile phone industry to the extreme," Dr. Khanna said. "Today's smartphones are extremely powerful, equivalent to supercomputers of the early '90s, and are the most power-efficient computer technology ever made.''

The idea of using video-gaming components like PS3s and graphics-cards yields a 10-fold cost-related benefit compared with traditional supercomputer parts. This is because the consumer gaming market is huge and intensely competitive as compared to the supercomputer market and that brings the cost down, even for the very high-end and powerful gaming technology. Dr. Khanna and his fellow researchers have found a way to re-purpose or 'misuse' the same parts for scientific supercomputing and that offered lots of savings. The idea now being researched by Dr. Khanna is whether that same strategy can be applied to chips found in our phones.

At the urging of Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, who grew up in nearby New Bedford and whose Snapdragon processors revolutionized the cell phone market worldwide, Dr. Khanna and his team started examining the power and efficiency of the phone chip processors, which could help with the costly electrical consumption issue.

Dr. Khanna and CSCVR researchers have performed very early and initial tests on that idea. They were able to discover that if a supercomputer was built using mobile phone chips it would use 30 times less electricity for the same performance from traditional supercomputer servers. To build an actual supercomputer, many more such chips will be needed and linked together similar to Dr. Khanna's PS3 cluster. Dr. Khanna's team cautions that they have only tested a single chip. However, this is a very positive sign in the early testing stages with a potential for huge savings on operating costs.

Dr. Khanna and his fellow CSCVR researchers are now exploring the potential of Qualcomm Snapdragon technology to perform very high-efficiency scientific supercomputing. The team is using Inforce Computing's SBC to evaluate Snapdragon's ability to run full-scale astrophysics and computational mathematics research codes.

The main point to be made Dr. Khanna argues is that the cost of electricity surpasses the cost of the purchasing the computer. Dr. Khanna installed his PS3 cluster in a refrigerated shipping container "reefer" of large cooling capability located conveniently on the University's campus. This system's performance is comparable to nearly 3000 processor-cores of a typical laptop or desktop. The novel approach that was developed involved the purchase of a refrigerated shipping container, or "reefer", of adequate size and cooling capacity and locating it conveniently on campus with power and network drawn from a nearby building. Such an approach is extremely low-cost given the abundant availability and high cooling capacity of these containers.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 08 2015, @06:41PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday August 08 2015, @06:41PM (#219947) Journal

    Get an unlocked phone, or root one.

    The article is about making supercomputers out of SoCs that would normally be found in phones, rather than distributed computing like BOINC/WCG/Folding@Home.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2