The Xbox 360 has a brand new use. It is now found that besides being just a gaming console, it could help researchers in modeling a wide range of processes. According to Dr. Simon Scarle, a researcher in the University of Warwick, the Xbox chip is a much cheaper alternative when compared to other forms of parallel processing hardware.
Dr. Scarle hoped to replicate just how electrical excitations taking place in the heart made their way around damaged cardiac cells. By doing this he could research and even predict cardiac arrhythmias which are translated as abnormal electrical activity in the heart that may just lead to a heart attack. In order to carry out these simulations by utilizing standard CPU based processing, researchers would need to spend pots of money on a parallel of computers or use a dedicated parallel processing computer.
The Warwick researcher is not new to the computer gaming industry. He was earlier a software engineer at the Wawickshire firm Rare Ltd which is a division of Microsoft Games Studios. It was during those days that he released the parallel processing power of the Xbox 360 GPU. He believed that this very chip could be used to conduct the same scientific modeling that would otherwise be carried out by expensive parallel network PCs.
The findings of his research have been printed in the journal Computational Biology and Chemistry. The results are written under the title ‘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’. It turns out that Dr. Simon’s belief that the console’s GPU may actually provide a cheaper solution was right.
Dr. Simon Scarle commented, “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.”
However according to a few cardiac researchers, it is not viable to envisage the rise of some dangerous arrhythmias.