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USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s
digitaldc writes with this excerpt from Gamasutra:
"The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 systems together to create what the organization is calling the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department. The Condor Cluster, as the group of systems is known, also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (500 TFLOPS), according to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell."
At the time of the PS3's release, it was very affordable for the Cell Architecture and performance it provided, and you could put your own operating system on it.
You know how Sony lost money on every PS3 sold... but then made the costs back with like 10 dollars from every game?
And you notice how the government bought 1,760 thousand of these things (or more) for a non-gaming purpose?
Did you hear the firmware updates and new PS3s remove the "Other OS" option?
Or did you think that those 3 incidents were entirely unrelated?
Man I ask a lot of questions.
You fail to understand the economies of scale.
While it is true in a sense that Sony spent more on each PS3 than they charged for them at the beginning of the cycle of the product, most of those costs are sunk costs in manufacturing. The more PS3s they sold, the less they were losing (rather than the other way around, which is the infantile economics view a lot of people claimed).
Now they have sold so many PS3s that the sunk costs are more than paid for, but it's not sensible to say current PS3s are profitable and older ones were not. They paid for development and equipment, and each PS3 sold at any time was revenue Sony used to recoup losses and eventually make a profit.
Think of it like this. You buy a $100 grill and $200 in meat to cook and sell hamburgers. You eventually sell 1000 burgers at $2. The combined cost of the first burger might seem like $300 or $100.20, but it was actually $0.21 the entire time if you think long term (which, of course, is how Sony saw it). the real fear at the beginning was that the PS3 would flop like the original XBOX did (imagine if you only sold 40 burgers). but it hasn't. It's a huge success and on track to sell almost as many units as the other two Playstations.
No, Sony did not cancel other OS to stop the Air Force from building this supercomputer. they did it to prevent analysis of their security architecture that facilitated pirating games.
As far as I know, they're the only console maker that has a branch of the American armed forces using their hardware for a literal supercomputer cluster, which is a stunning, resounding endorsement for the real world horsepower behind their hardware, and they've disabled the very "other OS" feature that allowed the air force to build the cluster in the first place.
What the hell, Sony, you idiots.
I wouldn't say "no matter how you look at it".
Super computing is also a lot about pushing those large quantities of data around and the programming that allows you to use that theoretical 500 TFLOPS of power. You could end up with something that can do significant calculations but just uses 100baseT to push data around. That's just isn't very efficient for many uses of super computers, and certainly not a world class number cruncher. Just to give you something to compare it against, super computers today are looking to have 10 Tbps switches on backplanes. That's 10 Tbps of information passing through the switch hooking up a rack of servers.
IMHO, hardware super computer engineering hurdles are about four things: processing power, data pipelines, memory, and dissipating heat. You can't fail any one of those four if you want something usable. (Software engineering hurdles I'll leave to experts as I am not one.)
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
Hi MR AC! I think what you and many of the other posters are missing is that having Linux on PS3 was BAD for Sony and here is why: Game consoles are traditionally sold using what is more commonly known as the "razor and blades" model, in that consoles are sold at a loss and they then make up for that loss PLUS make their profits on the blades, that is the licenses for games and peripherals
Now as I'm sure someone will point out the PS3 is no longer sold at a loss (does anybody know what they make? $5? Just because it isn't sold as a loss doesn't mean it is making anything either) but since we know these are running Linux that means every single one of those 1760 PS3s cost Sony money that they will NEVER make back. Because I seriously doubt the USAF is gonna be picking up 1760 copies of Little Big Planet or Move controllers.
So as you can see allowing Linux on the PS3, which allowed it to be used as a non gaming machines was a seriously BAD idea on Sony's part, and they were very right to kill it. Now I would agree that killing the support in older ones through an update was wrong, but not offering it on newer machines was the right idea. Imagine if they kept Linux and setups like the USAF took off: What good would selling hundreds of thousands of PS3s do Sony when not a single one of those machines will be buying any games or Blu Ray movies? Why would game publishers care about a system whose biggest selling point was lab work? So I'm sorry FOSS guys, but in the end it had less to do with Linux and everything to do with business. Sony is already in last place, having tons of machines locked away in labs don't help their bottom line any.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The publicity is worth quite a lot to them. It gets the PS3 a few mentions in the press in a context that suggests that the hardware is still considered extremely powerful. The mystical computational capability of the Cell is a large part of how Sony has promoted the PS3.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.