Running a UO Server on a PS3 with Ubuntu

[J MaNN]

Hi, i was wondering if its possible to run a UO server on a ps3 with ubuntu? I know the ps3 has its own version of ubuntu. Im sure it would work with mono, but how would i go about installing UOML on there?

[aj9251]

why in the HELL would you want to do that?!?

[Dr. Phillie]

That sure does sound quite crazy!

[Alex21]

do it! do it!

[Suil Ban]

Originally Posted by J MaNN

Hi, i was wondering if its possible to run a UO server on a ps3 with ubuntu? I know the ps3 has its own version of ubuntu. Im sure it would work with mono, but how would i go about installing UOML on there?

You don't need a full UO install to host a shard. There is a file in the ../scripts/misc folder that tells you what you need, DataPath.cs. You will also have to specify the path to the UO files in DataPath.

		/* The following is a list of files which a required for proper execution:
		 * 
		 * Multi.idx
		 * Multi.mul
		 * VerData.mul
		 * TileData.mul
		 * Map*.mul
		 * StaIdx*.mul
		 * Statics*.mul
		 * MapDif*.mul
		 * MapDifL*.mul
		 * StaDif*.mul
		 * StaDifL*.mul
		 * StaDifI*.mul
		 */

[J MaNN]

The reason i would want to do this is because the ps3 is powerful as hell, and totally beats my computer when it comes to power. Its processor is unbelievable and would run my shard beautifully.

[Ray]

Originally Posted by J MaNN

The reason i would want to do this is because the ps3 is powerful as hell, and totally beats my computer when it comes to power. Its processor is unbelievable and would run my shard beautifully.

TBH, no, it would be a below average server.

The Cell Processor is quite powerful, sure. But the needs of a persistance server are very different from what the ps3 tries to cover: Games, specifically End user software that dont need persistancy beyond some small save.

RunUO at the other hand needs:
- Huge RAM, to keep a whole world in memory. Games don't. They just load the current level. Thus, a PS3 has very limited memory that would be just enough to start RunUO.
- Fast HDD to periodically write a full world save. Every player has to wait until this was done (disregarding threaded persitance strategies). The PS3 has other needs.
- No graphics. The whole reality synthesizer card would be useless.
- Only 1 main game thread. There are not many places RunUO could even take advantage of the Cell's parallelism possibilities. And Mono? That would even be the next question.
- At last, the most of the time it's not the processor that is a bottleneck within runuo.


Really, the PS3 is rather unspectacular when it comes to server needs. At the other hand, i'm working with some server machines (16proc@3ghz, 48gb ram) which wouldn't be able to perform any better at unreal tournament than my own old PC.
Anyway, i would really like to see runuo on a ps3, though

Good Luck with this, and please tell us how you're proceeding,
-- Greetz, Ray

[J MaNN]

Well you see the ps3 has replaced a lot of super computers people use for stuff, such as servers, or even helping fold for folding@home. It is powerful enough in my opinion to host a server.

Gaurav Khanna’s eight PlayStation 3s aren’t running Heavenly Sword -- they’re using Linux plus custom code to solve complex computations.
Photo: Courtesy of Gaurav Khanna

Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony's PlayStation 3 isn't exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research.

Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.

It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it's a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.

"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."

He also says that the console's Cell processor, co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, can deliver massive amounts of power, comparable even to that of a supercomputer -- if you know how to optimize code and have a few extra consoles lying around that you can string together.

"The PS3/Linux combination offers a very attractive cost-performance solution whether the PS3s are distributed (like Sony and Stanford's Folding@home initiative) or clustered together (like Khanna's), says Sony's senior development manager of research and development, Noam Rimon.

According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he's not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. "It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time," Rimon says.

This is precisely what Khanna needed. Prior to obtaining his PS3s, Khanna relied on grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to use various supercomputing sites spread across the United States "Typically I'd use a couple hundred processors -- going up to 500 -- to do these same types of things."

However, each of those supercomputer runs cost Khanna as much as $5,000 in grant money. Eight 60 GB PS3s would cost just $3,200, by contrast, but Khanna figured he would have a hard time convincing the NSF to give him a grant to buy game consoles, even if the overall price tag was lower. So after tweaking his code this past summer so that it could take advantage of the Cell's unique architecture, Khanna set about petitioning Sony for some help in the form of free PS3s.

"Once I was able to get to the point that I had this kind of performance from a single PS3, I think that's when Sony started paying attention," Khanna says of his optimized code.

Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.

"Basically, it's almost like a replacement," he says. "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing."

"For the same amount of money -- well, I didn't pay for it, but even if you look into the amount of funding that would go into buying something like eight PS3s -- for the same amount of money I can do these runs indefinitely."

The point of the simulations Khanna and his team at UMass are running on the cluster is to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for almost 100 years but have never been observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day. Indeed, with NASA and other agencies building some very big gravitational wave observatories with the sensitivity to be able to detect these waves, Khanna's sees his work as complementary to such endeavors.

Khanna expects to publish the results of his research in the next few months. So while PS3 owners continue to wait for a fuller range of PS3 titles and low prices, at least they'll have some reading material to pass the time.

-http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer

[Midnightdragon]

PS3 is garbage compared to the machine I am using right now so I hope this is a joke...

PlayStation 3 Specifications and Details

Product name: PLAYSTATION 3

CPU: Cell Processor

* PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
* 1 VMX vector unit per core
* 512KB L2 cache
* 7 x SPE @3.2GHz
* 7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
* 7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* * 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU: RSX @550MHz

* 1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
* Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
* Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

Sound: Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-base processing)

Memory:

* 256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz
* 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz

System Bandwidth:

* Main RAM: 25.6GB/s
* VRAM: 22.4GB/s
* RSX: 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read)
* SB: 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)

System Floating Point Performance: 2 TFLOPS

Storage:

* HDD
* Detachable 2.5” HDD slot x 1

I/O:

* USB: Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
* Memory Stick: standard/Duo, PRO x 1
* SD: standard/mini x 1
* CompactFlash: (Type I, II) x 1

Communication: Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x3 (input x 1 + output x 2)

Wi-Fi: IEEE 802.11 b/g

Bluetooth: Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)

Controller:

* Bluetooth (up to 7)
* USB2.0 (wired)
* Wi-Fi (PSP®)
* Network (over IP)

AV Output:

* Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
* HDMI: HDMI out x 2
* Analog: AV MULTI OUT x 1
* Digital audio: DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) x 1

CD Disc media (read only):

* PlayStation CD-ROM
* PlayStation 2 CD-ROM
* CD-DA (ROM), CD-R, CD-RW
* SACD Hybrid (CD layer), SACD HD
* DualDisc (audio side), DualDisc (DVD side)

DVD Disc media (read only):

* PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM
* PLAYSTATION 3 DVD-ROM
* DVD-Video: DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW

Blu-ray Disc media (read only):

* PLAYSTATION 3 BD-ROM
* BD-Video: BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE

I am sorry but that is not powerful when compared to most well built custom computers I see and certainly nothing next to the machine I am using.

The ram looks impressive except for the fact that its still only 256mb and it needs to run that fast simply so that the PS3 can load and unload data to it as fast as it can. This also makes it great for the experiment posted above because the calculations being done do not require tons of ram but fast ram so that it can perform small tasks quickly.

You need to remember what the original design of the PS3 was intended for it was designed primarily to play disc based games where it reads busts of data from the disc and performs many small actions quickly.

[Jeff]

This is absolutely useless. However, would be quite interesting just to see if its do-able.

[zenroth]

I don't know much about the PS3, but what type of save memory does it use? If you have a decent amount of high speed flash memory it could be quicker than using a harddrive for world saves. Of course the rest of the problems are with lack of RAM, and RUNUO being single threaded (If you can rewrite the core/scripts to use all the available threading capabilities of the Cell Processor you might get somewhere. )

[J MaNN]

Originally Posted by zenroth

I don't know much about the PS3, but what type of save memory does it use? If you have a decent amount of high speed flash memory it could be quicker than using a harddrive for world saves. Of course the rest of the problems are with lack of RAM, and RUNUO being single threaded (If you can rewrite the core/scripts to use all the available threading capabilities of the Cell Processor you might get somewhere. )

Yes, well that would be nice if I could rewrite it, but thats on a different level :/

[Lysdexic]

It's like shoving one of those mini-flexATX boards into a Nintendo. Damn, I wish I had a PS3 to destroy.

[TMSTKSBK]

As a host for a production shard, this would suck. RunUO would not take advantage of the 9-core Cell, because it's just not set up to do that (without major rewrites).

As a "can it be done?"...DO IT!

[J MaNN]

Originally Posted by TMSTKSBK

As a host for a production shard, this would suck. RunUO would not take advantage of the 9-core Cell, because it's just not set up to do that (without major rewrites).

As a "can it be done?"...DO IT!

lol. This is funny to see the replies i get from asking this. I just wondered if it was possible to run at all. Now making rewrites for other things would be after i see if it can run at all :P I just want to know how i would go about doing this.

[Courageous]

Originally Posted by J MaNN

lol. This is funny to see the replies i get from asking this. I just wondered if it was possible to run at all. Now making rewrites for other things would be after i see if it can run at all :P I just want to know how i would go about doing this.

It could be made to run insofar as you get mono to run properly there. No big deal.

The threading issues are highly problematic. Runuo is basically non-reentrant by design. I happen to agree with that design. The amount of work it would take to make it reentrant is enormous.

C//

[Nar Matteru]

I can put your PS3 to a much better use. PM me for shipping information

[RabidWeezle]

I don't see how you all helped him, he asked a simple question, and the answer is, yes, it will work, but on shard that is of a small user base, like 20-30 players on at once. I wouldn't suggest it for the larger shards. I ran a shard on an original xbox, and at another point I ran a counter-strike server. What I suggest though is building the distro to be minimalistic. As in, tweak out the system to only run exactly what's needed. a real lightweight window manager, if you can just run command shell only and load it up that way (it's in the session deal when you login to ubuntu), and load up the server like wine runuo.exe from the shell that should be ok... I know when I last ran a shard though, it was with an actual linux port of a server emulator (that is now outdated?) and it ran pretty nice in gentoox linux. Course that was not running X at all, therefore, saving alot of memory and such. If it doesn't work at all for you, try to run a couple of those other servers that do have native linux ports without running X at all in a console, and you should find it usable.