2nd September 2007
A cluster of ten Playstation 3 consoles has been put into operation in the computer graphics laboratory of the Computer Science Department at the Technical University Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. The cluster will be used for computer graphics applications, including in particular the “TraCell” project. Alongside the Technical University, the other participants in this project are the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO in Stuttgart, IBM Deutschland GmbH (Böblingen/Mainz) and the Mannheim-based company VRmagic GmbH.
The goal of the project is to investigate how modern computer hardware can be used for realistic computer graphics, so-called ray tracing methods. The applications examined in the project are simulation of eye surgery and realistic design representations. The project is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
“The PS 3 features the Cell chip, which offers very high performance for our applications,” says Prof. André Hinkenjann, head of the computer graphics laboratory. The Cell chip is a joint development by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, and offers a maximum performance of around 250 GigaFLOPS (250 billion calculations per second). “Our task will be to actually make the performance of individual Cell chips or Cell chip clusters available for the graphic applications and to integrate this in a virtual reality system,” says Hinkenjann. back
Contact:
Prof. Dr. André Hinkenjann, Fachbereich Informatik
E-mail: andre.hinkenjann@fh-brs.de