SCEI considers commercial distributed computing venture

Thursday 12th April 2007, 05:05:00 PM, written by Farid

A few weeks following the entry of the PlayStation 3 and its Cell processor into Stanford’s Folding@Home program - a project aiming to study protein folding via molecular simulation in the hopes that scientists may gain insights into several diseases - the impressive results yielded have spurred interest in the Playstation 3's grid computing potential from within the corporate space.

So states Masa Chatani, CTO at Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), who mentioned recently in an interview with the Financial Times that his company has received numerous queries about the distributed computing power of the PS3. Chatani presently entertains the idea of creating a distributed computing business model with Sony’s latest console, citing the case of a small pharmaceutical company as an example of the type of potential customer that could be interested in this computing power, were it commercially available.

Chatani addressed the principal chink in that business model as well: console owner approval. In other words, what would be in it for the legal owners of the hardware? While most users feel compelled to give some Cell cycles to research fighting disease, they will not be as eager to run a distributed computing client just to increase SCEI's revenue streams.

The most obvious solution to this situation would be to hand over incentives to the PlayStation owners, which is exactly one of the scenarios Chatani had in mind. These incentives could take the form free products, or cumulative points which could be exchanged for products.

The growing interest into the distributed computing field might open the way towards more commercial projects; the times are right, as CPUs go to multiple cores, GPGPUs are a reality, and both AMD and NVIDIA are pushing their new parts as viable and economically competitive stream processors. So, the question would be: how long before companies start lurking behind all of the idle computing resources available in our PCs, and start offering incentives to their “farmers” for the calculation time they harvested for their clients?

 

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sony ± ps3, folding@home, computing

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