In the “How cool is this!” pile: According to HPCWire, researchers in the UK used a number of Xbox 360 gaming console chips to build a cheaper parallel processing engine for their research into the predictability of cardiac arrhythmias. The research is described in the journal Computational Biology and Chemistry in an article entitled “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”.
HPCWire quotes the lead researcher, Dr. Simon Scare, as saying: “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.”
Pretty soon, you may be able to deduct that Xbox as a legit business expense!
