22 September 2009

Computer power found in Xbox

When researchers are trying to model a range of processes, they need as much power in their computer system as possible, while not spending too much.

There is now a way to use the power and capabilities of a particular video game Microsoft Xbox 360 chip as a much cheaper alternative to other forms of parallel processing hardware, according to a new study by a University of Warwick researcher.

Dr. Simon Scarle, a researcher in the University of Warwick’s WMG Digital Laboratory, wished to model how electrical excitations in the heart moved around damaged cardiac cells in order to investigate or even predict cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal electrical activity in the heart which can lead to a heart attack). To conduct these simulations using traditional CPU based processing, one would normally need to book time on a dedicated parallel processing computer or spend thousands on a parallel network of PCs.

Scarle, however, also had a background in the computer games industry, as he had been a software engineer at the Warwickshire firm Rare Ltd, part of Microsoft Games Studios. His time there made him very aware of the parallel processing power of Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) of the Xbox 360, the popular computer games console. This chip could, for a few hundred pounds, conduct much the same scientific modeling as several thousand pounds of parallel network PCs, he said.

The good news is his hunch was right, and the Xbox 360 GPU does work, so researchers do have a source of cheap parallel processing.

“This is a highly effective way of carrying out high end parallel computing on ‘domestic’ hardware for cardiac simulations,” Scarle said. “Although major reworking of any previous code framework is required, the Xbox 360 is a very easy platform to develop for, and this cost can easily be outweighed by the benefits in gained computational power and speed, as well as the relative ease of visualization of the system.”

That was the good news. The bad news, however, is his study demonstrated it is impossible to predict the rise of certain dangerous arrhythmias, as he has shown that cardiac cell models are affected by a specific limitation of computational systems known as the Halting problem.

For related information, go to www.isa.org/manufacturing_automation.