XBox performs parallel tasks

Profs (possibly even... boffins) put away Halo 3 for five minutes.

British scientists have worked out that the XBox 360 can be used to power something other than teenage adrenaline rushes.

White coat wearers at the University of Warwick have taken the game console's GPU and made it perform parallel processing functions. Of course the fact that the Xbox 360 is a consumer games console means that the academics were able to perform some impressive number crunching on a very cheap system indeed - especially compared with the cost of using a dedicated clustering system.

According to a BBC report gleaned from a rather niche sounding periodical, the professors built a system that would let them model how electrical signals in the heart deal with damaged cells. That's much better than the usual 'scream at people while playing multi-player games' use that the XBox 360 usually endures.

When it comes to performance the GPU is not quite the full ticket, but the team said it's not all that far off either. Dr Simon Scarle, a researcher on the team, told the Beeb, "You don't quite get the full whammy of a cluster, but its close."

Now he just needs to kill the third zombie, steal its amulet, and blow up a dozen Covenant warships - that should do the trick.