Playstation Cell Power at GDC 2007

[superlative56]

Blogged On Wednesday 7 March

This week at Game Developers Conference IBM will show a Linux based real-time rendering a complex (3 million triangle) urban landscape, at 1080p resolution, using only software rendering techniques (PS3iRT).

Even though the PS3’s RSX is inaccessible under Linux the smart little system will reach out across the network and leverage multiple IBM QS20 blades to render the complex model, in real-time, with software based ray-tracing. Using IBM’s scalable iRT rendering technology, the PS3 is able to decompose each frame into manageable work regions and dynamically distribute them to blades or other PS3s for rendering. These regions are then further decomposed into sub-regions by the blade’s Cell processors and dynamically dispatched to the heavy lifting SPEs for rendering and image compression. Finished encoded regions are then sent back to the PS3 for Cell accelerated decompression, compositing, and display.


Here is a resolution reduced (30MB) Quicktime movie of the demo.

Myself, Mark Nutter, and Joaquin Madruga will be on hand in the IBM booth to run the demonstration so stop by, introduce yourself, and swap some Cell programming stories. Even though much has been made in the press about how difficult the Cell processors is to program, our team of three started with a couple white papers and in only three months created this renderer, the 3dsMax to BVH tree output tool chain, the display client, and the blade distribution framework using only the tools provided in the Cell SDK. Actually we spent as much time trying to figure out how to preserve our 3dsMax models during export and create a good BVH tree as we did writing the Cell code.

Source

 

[Atif]

Cell processor is really a great thing and this sample shows that.

 

[Chandoo]

supercomputer confirmed.

 

[A.Rafay]

its not a supercomputer dude

 

[Chandoo]

yes i know, i just like to tease inferno

 

[radd]

Even though the PS3’s RSX is inaccessible under Linux the smart little system will reach out across the network and leverage multiple IBM QS20 blades to render the complex model, in real-time, with software based ray-tracing. Using IBM’s scalable iRT rendering technology, the PS3 is able to decompose each frame into manageable work regions and dynamically distribute them to blades or other PS3s for rendering. These regions are then further decomposed into sub-regions by the blade’s Cell processors and dynamically dispatched to the heavy lifting SPEs for rendering and image compression. Finished encoded regions are then sent back to the PS3 for Cell accelerated decompression, compositing, and display.

umm...i think i understand a sentence or two of that ! i can read russian ! woot

 

[USUF]

is that industry type place rendered on the PS3??...doesnt look so great..or is it some other thing that they are trying to point out???