Playstation + EDA = greener data center

What does a Sony Playstation have to do with energy efficiency in data centers? I was talking with Charles Albertalli of Mentor Graphics last night at EDN’s Innovation Awards dinner in San Jose, and he was, as you’d expect very enthusiastic about Mentor’s Calibre nmOPC optical-proximity-correction tool. On the advice of their technology partner, IBM, which worked with Sony to develop the Playstation processor, Mentor ported the tool to run on the Cell processor which powers the graphics-intensive Playstation. 

Graphics processing relies heavily on algorithms such as Fourier transforms, which, it turns out, are a large part of the processing used by EDA tools such as Calibre, and also other specialized analysis tools like financial analysis (eg Monte Carlo analysis), and geologic analysis used in oil exploration. (All of these tools have been ported to the Playstation.) And, according to Albertalli, by running the Calibre nmOPC on the Playstation processor, Mentor is able to cut its use of data center compute cycles down to only 20% of what it would consume on garden-variety workstations.

So, in addition to server virtualization, it looks like data centers have another tool to improve processing efficiency and thus power efficiency.

(When I find companies running the Playstation in finance and oil exploration I’ll post more on them…)