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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."

4 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Don't Update by PaddyM · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't get the firmware update that gets rid of Linux. OOPS!

  2. 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.

  3. This is their third try. by Minwee · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.)

  4. Why are Sony so horribly short-sighted by mewsenews · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.