this is why there is alot more going for the playstation 3 than people think

[joeorc]

Welcome to the 6.189 Multicore Programming Primer: Learn and Compete in Programming the PLAYSTATION®3 Cell Processor.

Prof. Saman Amarasinghe and Dr. Rodric Rabbah
Email: 6.189-chair@mit.edu

This course is a brand new IAP 2007 class offering open to all MIT students (undergraduates and graduates). Students will spend several weeks learning about new multicore architectures and parallel programming patterns, and will design and implement projects to run directly on the new PLAYSTATION®3 consoles. The course will culminate in an exciting competition at the end of IAP, and prizes will be awarded to the best projects. The course will give students hands on experience in parallel programming in an exciting and relevant context.

a demo by MIT

Blue-Steel is a parallel ray tracer for generating high quality animations of 3 dimensional scenes constructed of triangles and spheres, with a variety of different lights and procedural shaders.

Distributing the work for this normally time-intensive process across the six SPEs of the Cell processor in the PS3 allows us to create very complex looking scenes with objects, lights, and materials updated dynamically every animation frame, and render these scenes at interactive rates between 10 and 15 frames per second. We demonstrated Blue-Steel using a variant of the classic Pong game.

In less than four weeks, we achieved quite a bit. On February 1, we presented a short-demo of Blue-Steel. Click the play button on the right to watch it.
Download video!
The demo visually demonstrates the performance scalability we achieve by leveraging more and more SPEs to increase the ray tracer throughput.

http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/blue-steel.shtml

this is quite impressive by the way..

[ESUNintel]

That is pretty cool.

Why can't my school do things like that? o, well

[CAB]

I wonder if M.I.T. ordered all the free BDs that came with those PS3s they are using for class. Someone should call and remind them before the end of the month.