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USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s

Posted by Soulskill on from the going-for-the-gusto dept.

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."

1 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why? by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.