Comment Re:Cell processor (Score 2, Informative) 144
Since most academic research groups are not overly flush with cash, the authors put these results in terms that someone holding the purse strings would understand. It terms of computing power per cost, the PS3 delivers 50,000 LUPS/dollar, the super high performance IBM QS20/QS21 runs at 3500 LUPS/dollar, while a quadcore desktop machine is capable of putting out 17,000 LUPS/dollar.
However, there seems to be the issue with the memory though:
The researchers point out that LB simulations take a large amount of RAM and, when moving to a three-dimensional simulation, the amount of RAM will become very important. Since the PS3 has only 256 MB of RAM, even moderately sized 3D grids could end up being written and read into swap memory, which would be a significant performance bottleneck.
