Supercomputing with Toys: Harnessing the Power of NVIDIA 8800GTX and Playstation 3 for Bioinformatics Problem

Justin Wilson, Manhong Dai, Elvis Jakupovic, Stanley Watson, Fan Meng*

Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. mengf@umich.edu

Proc LSS Comput Syst Bioinform Conf. August, 2007. Vol. 6, p. 387-390. Full-Text PDF

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Modern video cards and game consoles typically have much better performance to price ratios than that of general purpose CPUs. The parallel processing capabilities of game hardware are well-suited for high throughput biomedical data analysis. Our initial results suggest that game hardware is a cost-effective platform for some computationally demanding bioinformatics problems.