XBox does science as well as games

It has become a gamer’s best friend and given Microsoft hordes of young fans – but now one researcher thinks it could have answers for the scientific computing community too.

University of Warwick researcher Simon Scarle and Xbox

A new study by University of Warwick researcher Dr Simon Scarle has demonstrated that researchers trying to model a range of processes could use the power and capabilities of the XBox games console as a much cheaper alternative to other forms of parallel processing hardware. 

Dr Simon Scarle wished to model how electrical excitations in the heart moved around damaged cardiac cells in order to investigate or even predict cardiac arrhythmias. To conduct these simulations using traditional CPU based processing one would normally need to book time on a dedicated parallel processing computer or spend thousands on a parallel network of PCs.

Aware of the parallel processing power of graphical processing unit (GPU) of the XBox 360 - the popular computer games console played in many homes -he was convinced that this chip could, for a few hundred pounds, be employed to conduct much the same scientific modelling as several thousand pounds of parallel network PCs.

“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 visualisation of the system.”

However his research does have some bad news for a particular set of cardiac researchers in that his study demonstrates that it is impossible to predict the rise of certain dangerous arrhythmias, as he has shown that cardiac cell models are affected by a specific limitation of computational systems known as the Halting problem.