Running Processor Intensive Program On PS3 Viable?

[Hummer2097]

I have written a C++ program for analysing a large amount of data which has a fairly long run time on my Athlon 64 4000+. I was considering moving the program to the PS3 so I could run 6 instances (one for each core) processing different blocks of data. The program uses very little memory (1.6MB running in Windows) so the memory wouldn't be an issue, but it is very processor intensive.

I don't know much about Linux or what the PS3 is capable of and basically wanted to ask if this is a viable solution?

If it would work how long would it take for someone who has very little experience Linux to get it installed and get the program building and running? Is it just a case of going through an installation routine, creating a make file, compiling and running it?

Sorry this is a bit vague question but I just wanted to confirm using the PS3 was a workable solution before I bought one. Thanks for any advice you can offer.

[und0]

If data computation can be "vectorized" then could work, but isn't an automatic recompile, you need to modify your program to use the SPUs.

I've read something about Cell programming on the IBM developerworks pages, but i can't find it now, anyway you can start from their "homepage": http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

P.S. i've noted only now that you don't own a PS3, so i think you have better options to try first before buying a PS3, don't know about windos but for common distributions (like Debian, Fedora, Slackware) or Free/Net/OpenBSD there are tools to exploit networked PC with "little" effort, like Boinc (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), MPICH (Message Passing Interface) or PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine)...

[Hummer2097]

Thanks a lot for the reply and the link. I don’t come from a computing background and my lack of knowledge lead me to assume that it would be a simple matter of recompiling it in Linux and it would run. Unfortunately it looks like it would require a considerable rewrite and I wouldn’t be able to have it done in time for the submission deadline.

It’s a shame because I was going to buy a PS3 anyway for the games and I wanted to try Linux as well, but it looks like I’ll instead have to spend the money on a Core 2 Quad.

Thanks anyway for the help. I would have been in trouble if I'd spent all my money on a PS3 then found I needed to buy a new processor.