Folding at home (FAH) has taken the Guiness World Record for being the most powerful distributed computing network with a top speed of over 1 petaflop - (a thousand trillion calculations per second).
This is a remarkable achievement and shows the immense power that can be brought to bear by spare computing power used in a distributed network. The key here though is massive parallelism which means the various nodes in the network (your PC or PS3) are all doing different jobs at the same time and are at various points through these jobs. This is what made FAH and the old title holder Seti at Home (a search for extraterrestrial life) so scaleable.
Individual computers on the network download work units from the central repository, process them individually and then resubmit them back to the central core for post processing.
This is in contrast to say the Earth Simulator of Japan, a massive supercomputer capable of running huge simulations with ridiculous numbers of variables and calculations very quickly but where everything is interdependent. Likewise the ultimate aim of the BLUE project from IBM and the US Department of Energy is to be able to simulate all the forces and atoms of a nuclear explosion to simulate what's happening to USA's aging atomic weapons stockpile as they are no longer allowed to perform live tests.
This doesn't take anything away from their achievement, however it does go to show just how much wasted processing capacity there is lying around on the network.
The FAH project ramped up from 250 Teraflops (trillions of instructions per second) to just over a petaflop by the introduction of 670,000 PS3 owners supplying their hardware, up from the 200,000 PC users who got it to 250 Teraflops. Given that there are over 6 million PS3s in the wild this represents about 10% of the total Ps3 userbase - a quick calculation indicates that PS3 owners alone, should they all connect up to the internet, could provide about 7.5 Petaflops of processing power... this is beore we take into account PCs, XBoxes and Nintendo Wiis.
What this illustrates to me is that many of these projects are limited by their publicity and how "glamourous" they are. Taking nothing away from the geekiness of searching for ET or the importance of seeing how protein folding will affect drug development in the future, a more elegent solution would be an open framework that users subscribe to which is then used by anyone who wants to create a distributed processing application.
For the end user it is seamless and the for the multitude of public projects requiring raw processing cycles it gives them to opportunity to get access to larger numbers than their marketing budget would otherwise provide for. Even private companies could pay to rent processing time thus investing funds back into the project for ongoing development or optimisation.
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Friday, 2 November 2007
Monday, 15 October 2007
Let the new gaming witch hunt begin
I'm in my thirties now and I've been playing computer games from the age of about four when my dad first brought home the venerable Vic 20 - partly because he was doing a computer science degree at University but mostly because he wanted to tinker.
Through my life I've borne witness to the rise of computer gaming as a media format to rival and now surpass film and I've seen countless witch hunts focus on computer games as being the root of many of society's teenage evils - everything from being the cause of the obesity epidemic to turning children into cold blooded murderers and violent criminals.
I'd like to think that I'm pretty normal - whilst I have my own individual quirks as everyone does, psychological assessments that I've taken for a couple of employers have branded me pretty average on the whole "serial killer" metric. And even though I'm now suffering from the onset of a bit of "middle-agd-spread", as a teenager and child I was pretty skinny.
In thirty years of gaming I'd say I'm "above average" in terms of the amount of time I spent gaming. I wouldn't have hit "compulsive" but as a kid I'd spend a good hour or two a day playing on the computer. Conversely though I'd spend an hour or two playing outside per day though the key factor was that I watched virtually no TV.
You see my parents had a rule in our house - TV or Computer but not both. When my mum thought we had been spending a bit too much time in front of either she'd pull the plug out of the wall and summarily kick us out the door with the instructions that "it was a nice day - go enjoy it" - this held true even if it was raining or the middle of winter!
So, in what seems like a biennial event another review of gaming has been started - the Byron Review this time is being headed up by the very smart Dr Tanya Byron - an expert in Child Behaviour (and TV personality to add some celebrity to the proceedings). Whilst the review is supposed to cover the full range of technology, Gaming and the Internet are always the first things to crop up as being responsible for the decline of morality amongst our youth.
What won't be taken into account properly though in my opinion is how the role of the parent has changed in relation to these technologies. My parents looking back on it were pretty good (though I know I didn't think it at the time) in policing our internet and gaming activities (our family had access to the internet through a BBS at my dad's Uni).
The modern parent has completely divested themselves of any responsibility for policing their childs' activities. This isn't just limited to gaming and the internet but is a wider social epidemic we are starting to see the symptoms of - everything from anti-social behaviour to academic performance.
I know of adults who have bought games for their children aged under 10 that are clearly marked as being 18 certified. All because of pester power and the guilt that they have over not seeing their child because they have to go off and work all day. What scares me is the "oh well" attitude of these parents - and the fact that because the console is in their kid's bedroom they don't see the actual content themselves. For me games were played in the living room in full view of the rest of the house.
In the face of this blatant irresponsibilty from parents, what can the games industry do? They've created a product they have submitted to the classification board, risking censorship and potentially loss through narrowing their market but then the parents ignore it and go buy the game for their child anyway.
After the fact, parents are the ones calling for tougher regulation and a realignment of the game makers moral compass when it comes to producing the content but it is their failure and own moral ambiguity that has caused the problem in the first place.
For all the public outcries about video game related violence and exposure to sexual content, there is deafening silence regarding the lack of parenting skills to avoid exactly this situation. My parents could do it as could those of my friends - how have we lost that skill in a single generation?
Through my life I've borne witness to the rise of computer gaming as a media format to rival and now surpass film and I've seen countless witch hunts focus on computer games as being the root of many of society's teenage evils - everything from being the cause of the obesity epidemic to turning children into cold blooded murderers and violent criminals.
I'd like to think that I'm pretty normal - whilst I have my own individual quirks as everyone does, psychological assessments that I've taken for a couple of employers have branded me pretty average on the whole "serial killer" metric. And even though I'm now suffering from the onset of a bit of "middle-agd-spread", as a teenager and child I was pretty skinny.
In thirty years of gaming I'd say I'm "above average" in terms of the amount of time I spent gaming. I wouldn't have hit "compulsive" but as a kid I'd spend a good hour or two a day playing on the computer. Conversely though I'd spend an hour or two playing outside per day though the key factor was that I watched virtually no TV.
You see my parents had a rule in our house - TV or Computer but not both. When my mum thought we had been spending a bit too much time in front of either she'd pull the plug out of the wall and summarily kick us out the door with the instructions that "it was a nice day - go enjoy it" - this held true even if it was raining or the middle of winter!
So, in what seems like a biennial event another review of gaming has been started - the Byron Review this time is being headed up by the very smart Dr Tanya Byron - an expert in Child Behaviour (and TV personality to add some celebrity to the proceedings). Whilst the review is supposed to cover the full range of technology, Gaming and the Internet are always the first things to crop up as being responsible for the decline of morality amongst our youth.
What won't be taken into account properly though in my opinion is how the role of the parent has changed in relation to these technologies. My parents looking back on it were pretty good (though I know I didn't think it at the time) in policing our internet and gaming activities (our family had access to the internet through a BBS at my dad's Uni).
The modern parent has completely divested themselves of any responsibility for policing their childs' activities. This isn't just limited to gaming and the internet but is a wider social epidemic we are starting to see the symptoms of - everything from anti-social behaviour to academic performance.
I know of adults who have bought games for their children aged under 10 that are clearly marked as being 18 certified. All because of pester power and the guilt that they have over not seeing their child because they have to go off and work all day. What scares me is the "oh well" attitude of these parents - and the fact that because the console is in their kid's bedroom they don't see the actual content themselves. For me games were played in the living room in full view of the rest of the house.
In the face of this blatant irresponsibilty from parents, what can the games industry do? They've created a product they have submitted to the classification board, risking censorship and potentially loss through narrowing their market but then the parents ignore it and go buy the game for their child anyway.
After the fact, parents are the ones calling for tougher regulation and a realignment of the game makers moral compass when it comes to producing the content but it is their failure and own moral ambiguity that has caused the problem in the first place.
For all the public outcries about video game related violence and exposure to sexual content, there is deafening silence regarding the lack of parenting skills to avoid exactly this situation. My parents could do it as could those of my friends - how have we lost that skill in a single generation?
Tuesday, 3 July 2007
Is £180 good value for Wii Sports?
I am definitely a Nintendo fan boy. I've had every Nintendo console released on the market plus so many Game & Watches it's not funny. Call me sentimental but Nintendo has been a part of and is one of the definers of my life.
So obviously when the Wii came out there was no question I was going to get one. The new controllers are awesome and just show you what a massive difference can be made in computer-human interaction by adding a couple of extra components and removing some wires.
But for some reason this time I didn't get one on launch or near to launch date. The reason? Because I didn't see any games I'd play. In the end it wasn't until June that I finally went and got one. The reason? My wife said she wanted to play Wii Sports! This obviously made it easier to add another console under the TV in the lounge room so in it went.
Now if you haven't played it, Wii Sports ships with the console so in that regard it is free. In it there are a series of very well built games ostensibly to demonstrate the different ways the controller can be used. Tennis, Golf, Baseball, Ten Pin and Boxing all make an appearance.
My other half and child love it. For my wife it is a change of all the things she hates about computer games (pushing buttons that bear no relation to the action on screen) and my child (who is nearly three) just likes swinging the controller and playing with mum and dad.
But something inside of me just isn't loving my Wii. I walk into GAME and check out all the releases and there's nothing I want badly enough to part with £40 for. I got Zelda more because I thought I should rather than because I thought it was amazing and it is a fantastic piece of software engineering but it has the feel of a MMORPG grind about it so whilst I've nearly finished it now it has left me tepid in a way that Ocarina of Time never did.
At present the Wii is the most sold "next gen" console and regular "sold out" signs at GAME down the road suggest they are still selling like hot cakes.
Back to my original question though which is is £180 good value for Wii Sports.
Personally I'm more likely to play a bit of Wii Tennis when I get home than watch TV. In real terms my wife and I have played a good dozen hours of Wii Sports each (mostly together) otherwise we'd have gone to the cinema or something which would be £15 a ticket for 2 hours. That alone is about £180 by itself and when you pass the controller over to a neice or nephew or child of a friend who hasn't got one you do get that warm techie buzz about someone "getting it" for the first time and I think that is probably worth £180 any day of the week.
So obviously when the Wii came out there was no question I was going to get one. The new controllers are awesome and just show you what a massive difference can be made in computer-human interaction by adding a couple of extra components and removing some wires.
But for some reason this time I didn't get one on launch or near to launch date. The reason? Because I didn't see any games I'd play. In the end it wasn't until June that I finally went and got one. The reason? My wife said she wanted to play Wii Sports! This obviously made it easier to add another console under the TV in the lounge room so in it went.
Now if you haven't played it, Wii Sports ships with the console so in that regard it is free. In it there are a series of very well built games ostensibly to demonstrate the different ways the controller can be used. Tennis, Golf, Baseball, Ten Pin and Boxing all make an appearance.
My other half and child love it. For my wife it is a change of all the things she hates about computer games (pushing buttons that bear no relation to the action on screen) and my child (who is nearly three) just likes swinging the controller and playing with mum and dad.
But something inside of me just isn't loving my Wii. I walk into GAME and check out all the releases and there's nothing I want badly enough to part with £40 for. I got Zelda more because I thought I should rather than because I thought it was amazing and it is a fantastic piece of software engineering but it has the feel of a MMORPG grind about it so whilst I've nearly finished it now it has left me tepid in a way that Ocarina of Time never did.
At present the Wii is the most sold "next gen" console and regular "sold out" signs at GAME down the road suggest they are still selling like hot cakes.
Back to my original question though which is is £180 good value for Wii Sports.
Personally I'm more likely to play a bit of Wii Tennis when I get home than watch TV. In real terms my wife and I have played a good dozen hours of Wii Sports each (mostly together) otherwise we'd have gone to the cinema or something which would be £15 a ticket for 2 hours. That alone is about £180 by itself and when you pass the controller over to a neice or nephew or child of a friend who hasn't got one you do get that warm techie buzz about someone "getting it" for the first time and I think that is probably worth £180 any day of the week.
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