XBox 360 and GPGPU

It seems Microsoft's console is jumping into the bandwagon of parallel computing using GPGPUs, with new research published that explores parallel computing using the graphics card of Microsoft's XBox 360.

Dr Simon Scarle, previously a Microsoft Rare Studio Software Engineer, who is now a researcher at Warwick University's WMG Digital Laboratory, used one of the XBox 360's GPUs to carry out research on how electrical signals around the heart moved around damaged cardiac cells.



Sony's PS3 has made the use of parallel computing from the very date of its release, with Stanford University's Folding@Home project, and has software development kits (SDK) for harnessing the parallel processing capability of the console.

On a previous post, I mentioned how the PS3's parallel computing capability has also been used to create a flocking simulation. It would be interesting to see if such simulations are, created on the X360, and to see if Microsoft will consider releasing an SDK to attract researchers and developers to use its console for this purpose.

It would certainly be a cost saving way of carrying out research that requires parallel computations, rather than the traditional use of clustered PCs or setting up a network of PCs.

Big, Fast Crowds on the Sony PlayStation 3

Craig Reynolds first introduced flocking to the computer graphics area by creating the Boids artificial life simulation in 1986. It was a computer model of coordinated animal motion such as bird flocks or fish schools, that allowed for collision avoidance and goal seeking. This model has had various applications such as bat swarms and penguin flocks in the movie 'Batman Returns'. A video of the early model can be seen below, further details can be found here


The above model has a complexity of O(n²), as each boid needs to consider each other boid in order to determine whether its a nearby flockmate. The complexity can be reduced to O(n), by the use of spatial hashing that keeps the boids sorted according to their location, and therefore, increase the population of the boids.

Craig now works for the US R&D group of Sony Computer Entertainment. Recently he created a crowd simulation on the Sony PlayStation 3, which extends from the very early model above. As spatial hashing is used in order to accomodate large numbers of agents, here, it forms the basis of a scalable multi-processor approach to create large, fast crowd simulations. The PlayStation 3 has Cell processor, which consists of a Power Processor Unit (PPU), multiple Synergistic Processor Units (SPU) - 6 available to the model, and an RSX GPU. The model makes use of this architecture to spatially subdivide regions, and use the multiple SPUs to update a number of regions in parallel, accelerating the crowd simulation. The model has been able to incorporate 15,000 agents running at 60fps. A video can be seen by clicking the picture below:


It is interesting to see how different architectures can be used to create crowd simulations, and how the parallel processing nature of today's video games consoles, make them low-cost and high performance platforms for parallel execution. I will be looking forward to see other general purpose applications of the Sony PS3.