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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."
Don't get the firmware update that gets rid of Linux. OOPS!
Cheaper then the IBM CELL Blades...
Because they had a ton of leftover trade-in value at Gamestop.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
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.
Previous efforts included a supercomputer made up of 1760 Wiis, but the resulting cluster had less computing power than the researchers' mobile phones and had to be abandoned.
A second attempt at putting together a cluster of 1760 X-Boxes was scuttled when investigations showed no less than 600 of them were showing Red Rings of Doom at any given time.
The Air Force team is confident that using PS3s is a better idea due to their size, weight, and the fact that nobody can find any games that they want to play on them anyway.
(Are there any fanboys I haven't offended with this? I'm trying to be thorough.)
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.
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.
No, they were losing actual money on each one. That is, they spent some amount of money to design and tool for it. Then, for each one they put out, they spent more on the materials and construction than they took in. They weren't making money but not paying off the initial cost. They were actually losing money on each one. They required game sales to make up the difference. And they did.
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.
The hardware profits (if any) have still not reached the level of the hardware development and production costs. They have not now, or ever, made money on putting out PS3 hardware.
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.
You are wrong. It's like buying a $1000 grill and $1000 in meat to sell 100 hamburgers at $5 each. You spent $2000 to make $500. There is no way to buy another batch of $1000 meat and sell another set of burgers at $5 to make up the difference. However, Sony knows this. They sold it with fries and a drink. The cost for fries and a drink is $1 per order, and the combo is sold at $12. So if everyone who walks up buys only a burger, Sony would have gone out of business (provided they made enough burgers). However, almost everyone gets the combo, so Sony makes about a 10% profit overall on the burger, even though they are selling them at a loss.
This isn't like car sales, which is how you described (except for the Volt, which loses money for each one sold with no way to ever make it up, so they are written off as R&D expenses or such). It takes over a billion dollars to design and tool for a new car, so the first one is either sold at a billion dollar loss, or all of them get some percentage of that cost attached to them causing the net profit to be called a loss until some volume is achieved. But the Volt and the PS3 were sold for an actual loss. The more volume sold, the greater the loss.
Learn to love Alaska
Pipped by one minute. That's gotta sting.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Distributed computing. Have a PS3 app that is installed if selected and when your not playing it runs distributed computing. Give the people whos PS3's are been used something in return like online credits for DLC.
Anyone got any figures on how much processing could be available if done?
Folding@Home did exactly what you are proposing. PS3s are a major contributor to the project:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
you must be one of those people who think the PC in PowerPC stands for Personal Computer.
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