Bench Press

We’ve talked before about researchers using PlayStation game consoles and gaming graphics cards to perform scientific computing, but we hadn’t heard too much about Microsoft’s XBox. Until now, that is, when University of Warwick researcher Dr. Simon Scarle demonstrated the use of the graphical horsepower on an XBox360 in high performance computing. By taking advantage of the parallel processing power of the on-board GPU, Dr. Scarle was able to use an Xbox360 to aid in his research and sidestepped the need to reserve time on a dedicated parallel processing computer or shell out thousands for a parallel network of PC’s.

Armed with his gaming console, Dr. Scarle used the Xbox’s GPU computing power to calculate and even predict cardiac arrhythmias based on his model of electric excitations of the heart. The result? A paper titled Implications of the Turing completeness of reaction-diffusion models, informed by GPGPU simulations on an XBox 360: Cardiac arrhythmias, re-entry and the Halting problem.

This is a highly effective way of carrying out high end parallel computing on “domestic” hardware for cardiac simulations. 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.

So much attention thus far has focused on using the PlayStation 3 in distributed computing projects like Folding@Home — maybe its time that Microsoft release some sort of software to let the legions of XBox360 owners out there show the PS3 users that their machines are good for more than just gaming?