You guys are gonna love this. Sony is talking of using distributed computing to improve the playstation....
SAN JOSE, Calif.--If distributed computing can unravel the building blocks of life, it can probably help make a better version of "Crash Bandicoot."
That appears to be Sony's thinking as the electronics giant moves ahead with development of the next version of its PlayStation video game console.
Speaking at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), an annual trade show for the creative and technological sides of the game industry, Shin'ichi Okamoto, chief technical officer for Sony Computer Entertainment, said research efforts for the PlayStation 3 are focusing on distributed computing, a method for spreading computational tasks across myriad networked computers.
Distributed computing is making headway as a way for researchers to conduct demanding computing experiments, such as an ongoing project by Stanford University to unlock protein structures.
Okamoto said the method also appears to hold the most promise for dramatically boosting the performance of the next PlayStation. Game developers have said they would like the next console to have a thousand times the processing power of the PlayStation 2 (news - web sites). There's no way to do that with hardware advances alone, he said.
"Moore's Law is too slow for us," Okamoto said, referring to the long-held truism that semiconductor power doubles roughly every 18 months. "We can't wait 20 years" to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in PlayStation performance, he said.
Okamoto said Sony is working with IBM to apply Big Blue's research in "grid computing," a variation of distributed computing, to the next PlayStation. While he didn't share details, the plan presumably would involve networked game machines sharing software, processing power and data.
Okamoto added that the recently released kit that allows PlayStation 2 users to run Linux (news - web sites) software on the console is the foundation for much of the research.
SAN JOSE, Calif.--If distributed computing can unravel the building blocks of life, it can probably help make a better version of "Crash Bandicoot."
That appears to be Sony's thinking as the electronics giant moves ahead with development of the next version of its PlayStation video game console.
Speaking at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), an annual trade show for the creative and technological sides of the game industry, Shin'ichi Okamoto, chief technical officer for Sony Computer Entertainment, said research efforts for the PlayStation 3 are focusing on distributed computing, a method for spreading computational tasks across myriad networked computers.
Distributed computing is making headway as a way for researchers to conduct demanding computing experiments, such as an ongoing project by Stanford University to unlock protein structures.
Okamoto said the method also appears to hold the most promise for dramatically boosting the performance of the next PlayStation. Game developers have said they would like the next console to have a thousand times the processing power of the PlayStation 2 (news - web sites). There's no way to do that with hardware advances alone, he said.
"Moore's Law is too slow for us," Okamoto said, referring to the long-held truism that semiconductor power doubles roughly every 18 months. "We can't wait 20 years" to achieve a 1,000-fold increase in PlayStation performance, he said.
Okamoto said Sony is working with IBM to apply Big Blue's research in "grid computing," a variation of distributed computing, to the next PlayStation. While he didn't share details, the plan presumably would involve networked game machines sharing software, processing power and data.
Okamoto added that the recently released kit that allows PlayStation 2 users to run Linux (news - web sites) software on the console is the foundation for much of the research.
