At the beginning of the new year in 2014, the hottest topic, in addition to "the country has released a single second child, do you have a second child?", there is also "Is it late to lift the ban on game consoles?"

Just a few days ago, the relevant departments that had just finished the New Year's holiday and started to work, officially explained the statement about the lifting of the ban on game consoles, saying that game consoles can be produced in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, which can be sold nationwide, of course, if you want to wait until the National Bank PS3 is officially put on the shelves, you have to wait for a while, because Sony wants to contact partners to set up factories in the free trade zone, and at the same time, it also has to organize its games to be submitted for review.

There is no doubt that at this time, a news of "using 100 PT computers to build a private supercomputer" suddenly appeared, in which the intention of stealing the limelight and paying attention is simply clear at a glance, no wonder Liu Shumeng will ask if this is Atletico Madrid's big chess.

Faced with this question, Atletico nodded calmly and admitted that this is not an ulterior secret. As a new platform, the only advantage of Bee PT is the advantage of a few months in exchange for carrying a computer vest without face and skin.

As for the other potential advantage, that is, the geographical advantage of local operations, to be honest, it is not as big as it seems. After all, the time is not as good as the location, the location is not as good as the people, although PT has been listed in the name of multimedia computers, but most of the games on PT are transplanted PC online games and mobile games, and obviously "in order to play online games、Mobile games to buy a game machine" The idea has not yet become the mainstream, so in the past three months, the bee has only accumulated 300,000 sales, and PS4 broke the number of one million on the first day after its launch, it is simply weak.

There is no doubt that in a few months, the three major consoles will come in with a large number of classic games, and the local combat of PT game consoles will likely evolve into a "geographical advantage is not as good as people" cup, just look at how strong the consumer enthusiasm of the domestic host party has been suppressed for more than ten years.

Atletico Madrid naturally can't raise their hands to admit defeat, in addition to actively submitting for review and preparing to launch a number of large-scale stand-alone games, they also think of a piece of wisdom from Sony three years ago.

That is to launch a PT-based civilian supercomputing system.

The so-called civilian supercomputer and cheap supercomputer are actually a sad story of "everyone is a machine guy, why should they hurt each other?".

Naturally, this guy refers to computer manufacturers, especially commercial computers. Usually, the sales volume of such a tall thing as supercomputing is not very high, but the selling price is also higher, because it is necessary to leave enough R&D, operation and marketing costs in the gross profit, if there is only a 5% profit margin like ordinary civilian microcomputers, manufacturers are properly losing money to the rhythm of death, and civilian supercomputers are undoubtedly digging the corners of these manufacturers.

For official scientific research institutions, prestigious universities, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, as well as special effects companies and game companies, the high cost of supercomputing is not a problem, and they either have official funds to eat and drink, or they are engaged in high-profit industries with good profitability and can easily earn back this huge investment. At that time, Zhu Jun of Jiucun purchased several of the top ten supercomputers in the country from HP in order to operate World of Warcraft, and this popular game quickly helped him make money back.

In short, even for those people and institutions who are not bad for money, the high price of supercomputing is still worth the money, although you can't buy and buy one arbitrarily and keep one for as an exhibit, but you still have to buy it when there is a demand. For ordinary companies and even individuals, the obvious price gap between the supercomputer and the parts will be difficult for them.

Of course, this problem is actually ten years ago, after that, with the development of distributed computing technology, plug-and-play performance can be infinitely scalable blade computers began to become popular on a large scale, making the technical difficulty of assembling and manufacturing a supercomputer a lot lower, and the corresponding price has also dropped a lot, at least it has become easier to solve the problem.

In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, or the development of semiconductor integrated circuit technology, the cost of developing and producing computers with the same performance is also declining rapidly. For example, the "Galaxy-1" giant machine, which needed to be built 30 years ago, can perform 100 million calculations per second, and now the mainstream multi-core desktop computers have already exceeded 100 million floating point operations per second.

However, at the same time, people's judgment standards for supercomputers are also rising, from tens of millions and hundreds of millions of times a few decades ago, to more than a trillion times per second to be regarded as HPC (high-performance computers) and ranked on the supercomputer list.

And it can't be simply because desktop processors generally reach 2GHz instant clock frequency of 2 billion times per second, and simply say i3 seconds Galaxy (No. 1), which is extremely irresponsible. After all, the two are completely different architecture and design ideas, Galaxy 1 is a popular vector computer in the 80s, and after the 90s, most computers are already scalar computers that can give full play to the advantages of multi-core CPUs, supercomputing since the new century, except for Japan's earth simulator (2002) or vector computers, all of them can be "infinitely" stacked CPU scalar machines in the world.

Vector computing in the field of computer science, or vector computing, refers to treating a set of data as a whole and all the components of a vector, so that after calculating a vector, it is equivalent to performing a batch calculation of all the corresponding data. The advantage of this calculation method is that it can make full use of the CPU hardware performance, and is very good at dealing with mathematical and physical problems (the essence is still a mathematical problem), and the maximum possible parallel computing can be realized to speed up data processing, but it also has obvious shortcomings, one is that the data needs to be preprocessed, and the algorithm needs to be carefully designed to convert the ordinary data processing task into a vector computing task, and then handed over to the vector computer to carry out centralized calculation, and finally return the result.

Then when integrated circuit technology develops, the price of CPU falls to the point of hundreds of dozens of dollars, or even only a few pieces, this tall computing mode is eliminated, and replaced by scalar computing of "stupid method one plus one plus one plus one and then plus one", such as floating-point calculations used to test the performance of modern computers, and a floating-point calculation can only operate two numbers.

Although in the field of scientific computing, modern desktop microcomputers based on scalar computing may still not be as good as the giant computers of the year, but considering the cost volume and power consumption between them, it is completely possible to pile these old-timers to death by heap quantity, and this kind of computer has a special name beowulf in foreign countries.

Originating from the Goddard Space Center in the United States in 1994, Beowulf was originally composed of 16 486 computers with the help of a 10M local area network to run a specialized Linux system. This method of using ordinary computers to organize themselves together with the help of the Internet and open-source software to carry out large-scale computing soon became popular among university campuses and scientific research institutions with great demand for supercomputing, and it can also be said to be the ancestor of all civilian supercomputers in the future.

The U.S. Air Force's 2010 Condorclter, which consisted of 1,760 PS3s and 168 graphics cards, can also be described as a kind of Beowulf cluster, although they use game consoles instead of regular PCs.

This computer, which is used to process and display a wide range of image data in real time, can perform 500 trillion floating-point calculations per second, which can be regarded as supercomputing, and it is a very cheap supercomputer, 200 dollars for a PS3, the entire system only costs 400,000 dollars, for the US military is just the price of a few air-to-air missiles, proper socheap (so cheap)!

However, at this time, those professional and top supercomputers have begun to hit the 100 billion times mark, for example, the domestic supercomputer Tianhe No. 2, which now dominates the first place in the world's TOP500, has a computing performance of more than 300 million times per second, which is 600 times that of Condorclter, and of course, the cost has reached 1000 times that of the latter.

In fact, this comparison still doesn't make much sense, and it doesn't mean that 1 million PS3 units can be combined to get a supercomputer with performance close to Tianhe 2, saving hundreds of millions of dollars for the country.

Leaving aside the differences in performance other than floating-point performance, the difference in functional purpose alone is not overcome. Tianhe-2, the world's top supercomputer, is designed to provide a high-performance computing platform to the public in need, while PS3 supercomputing is usually built by people who need it for their own specific purposes, using open-source software. What can usually be done on them can be moved to a general platform like Tianhe, and what Tianhe can do, PS3 supercomputing is likely not to be able to do.

Moreover, the use of game consoles to form supercomputing clusters is actually very unfavorable to Sony, because they are "losing money and selling hardware", and the hardware sales revenue alone cannot cover the company's various costs, and it mainly relies on game software sales commissions to make money. If everyone buys a game console and doesn't play games when they go back,SCEn Computer Entertainment is to follow in the footsteps of Sony TV,Become a bitter child who sells more, the better the sales, and the worse the loss。

Fortunately, there are always a few people who can use PS3 to assemble supercomputers, so PS3 supercomputers not only did not bring a large loss to SCE, but created a novel "sense of technology", as if the game console and the supercomputer representing the strongest technology on behalf of the earth have become tall and tall.

However, everything is basically insulated from domestic users, and everyone can only watch it on the Internet. Not to mention anything else, the ban on game consoles that has not been officially lifted is a hurdle that cannot be bypassed, and game consoles cannot be sold publicly in the mainland market until the ban is officially lifted. Although they are all assembled and produced in mainland factories, players need to buy parallel cargo machines that have illegally flowed into the domestic market through various parallel goods stores, and for parallel goods stores, the large order of hundreds of game machines is not a big achievement, but a poisonous bait that attracts the relevant departments, and no one will be happy to accept it.

Of course, even if he is willing, the leaders at all levels who are responsible for approving the allocation of research funds will not allow the people below to use scientific research funds to buy game consoles, which is too unserious, and do you want to do it in the later audit?

The researchers who need it can't afford it, and the local tyrant players who can afford it can't use supercomputing. In short, for various reasons, it has become an impossible task for domestic users to have their own inexpensive supercomputers or their own research teams.

At this time, the multimedia computer vest of PT game console has become a favorable factor.

First of all, it is indeed a high-performance desktop computer, although it is not the most mainstream x86 architecture on the desktop, but its ARM-derived reduced instruction set architecture can still handle most tasks, and it is much cheaper and more power-efficient than a PC.

The second is that there are a lot of software and games on it, and they are generally free, of course, there are also advanced features and in-app purchases if you want to spend money. Every time the bee system is upgraded, the bee will simultaneously release new system adaptation versions of all the software and games under their name, and the old system version will not be completely abandoned, but the update frequency will decrease.

Over the past few years, not only has bees earned a "mysterious high yield" nickname, but also accumulated a large number of application software and games for the bee system, although the number is still not comparable to the massive accumulation of Windows 20 years, but it is still no problem to exceed macOS of course, only the number of Chinese version of software and games.

The third point,And the most critical point,That is,Bee Games has actually done most of the work of assembling civilian supercomputers,All users need to do is to buy a bunch of PT game consoles and go back to connect them with LAN,Turn on and turn on the beehome collaborative computing mode on any machine,Next, whether it is audio and video special effects production、Or game development can be easily done,You can even use this supercomputer to play games。

Although this can only use the functions provided by the Bee OS4 system, it is better to be simple and rude, especially with only one network cable to connect a PT, and the other wireless mode with its own WiFi function is connected, which saves the complicated wiring and placement problems.

For example, the "God Trench" who bought 100 PTs and went back to play "Bee Earth 3", his pile of machines was not connected with network cables. As the name suggests, it is also a 3D globe software, but the "real picture" of the earth provided by this software is not real, but the result of simulation based on various data.

However, the abandonment of the realism of satellite maps also allows the software to create more beautiful and attractive landscapes of the earth, such as dynamic weather and dynamic flora and fauna. The sunrise and moon setting, budding and flowering, and animal migration simulated by the software are even more magnificent and charming than feature documentaries, at least in the 4K ultra-clear video of "God Trench Takes You to See the Earth" circulating on the Internet. For mobile phone users, please visit http://m.piaotian.net