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US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s

Posted by Soulskill on from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.

bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."

7 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe someone should tell them the new ones don't run Linux.

    1. Re:Wow by TheDarAve · · Score: 5, Funny

      Its the Air Force, it'd be an Airwolf cluster.

  2. Loss for Sony? by SlothDead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since Sony's strategy (like Microsoft's) is to sell the consoles below production costs and make money on the games I guess that they are now pretty angry about organizations buying PS3s solely for computing...

    1. Re:Loss for Sony? by RogueyWon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is only true for the start of a console cycle. By this point, Sony and MS should at worst be breaking even on console sales and probably having a bit of profit. Component prices fall dramatically over the course of the typical 5-year console cycle.

  3. Re:Cell processor by emilper · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They would buy Cell processors, but then then it would take an year and a half for the papers to be processed, six month for IBM and Dep.Def. to spec the systems, and about two years while competitors contest the order ... everything costing about 10 times as much for one half of the computing power, and would not be able to run much else besides floating point calculations.

    BTW, has anybody tried DwarfFortress on a PS3 ?

     

  4. Black Friday Deals! by upto0013 · · Score: 5, Funny

    They should wait for Black Friday, nobody is going to fight the Air Force for a doorbuster...

  5. Re:Cell processor by umghhh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I suppose if they ordered a system designed specifically for their purpose it would cost a dozen millions more on top of this half that you mentioned and then they still had to do in house software stated in the summary. So indeed they saved some - even if you consider all the military expense a nonsense anyway it was still half a mil wasted instead of a dozen.