Porting Some Key Caltech & JPL Applications to a PS3 Cluster - A Wild Ride

Last October Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) purchased 13 PS3’s (a lucky number) to build a high performance parallel algorithm testbed for under $10K with a peak potential of a little over 2 TFLOPS single precision. Well, as a kid in Texas I remember my uncle always saying “A cheap horse is hard to ride”. It has been interesting so far and we will share “the ride” with you.