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Air Force Supercomputer Made From PS3's
The Air Force's Research Lab in Rome, NY. has one of the cheapest supercomputers ever made, and best of all over 3,000 of your friends can play Tekken on it. The computer is made from 1,716 PlayStation 3s linked together, and is used to process images from spy planes. From the article: "The Air Force calls the souped-up PlayStations the Condor Supercomputer and says it is among the 40 fastest computers in the world. The Condor went online late last year, and it will likely change the way the Air Force and the Air National Guard watch things on the ground." We covered this story back in December when the Condor first went online.
we already know this, and we already discussed it AGAIN when sony deactivated the otheros option...
We covered this story back in December when the Condor first went online.
And ... what's changed?
Watch out for that next firmware update!
. .
With the "Other OS" removed, doesn't it mean that the supercomputer is violating the DCMA?
The Air Force is also using the Condor to process ground-based radar images of space objects, again with extraordinary clarity. Barnell shows images of a space shuttle orbiting Earth at 5 miles a second. Without Condor processing, the shuttle image is a blurry black triangle. With Condor processing, it is sharp and distinct. It’s clear that its payload doors are open.
Zoom! Enhance!
Wonder when Sony is going to try and sue them.
Hope noone runs a firmware update, they'll have to call Geohot to get Linux back on it.
Gives new meaning to the term "War Gaming"
I accidentally other os. Is this dangerous?
goatse link above
Can you imagine what it would be like if it was made instead of 1716 XBOX 360's?
They would be replacing red-ringed XBOXes more often than scientists had to replace vacuum tubes on ENIAC.
Hey, I was only kidding. You don't have to MOD me "Troll" . . . again . . . .
Sony is shutting down Linux and I think it might have to do out of fear that if a lot of people like the Air Force guys from the article start buying PS3 as mere CPUs, all of the sudden Sony will be subsidizing a lot more than they thought they could get in return with the sales of games.
Would be cooler to have a PS3 game where you get to control 1,716 USAF planes.
What is it about the PS3 that has made it ideally suited to these distributed supercomputing applications, whereas the games are entirely lackluster compared to the 360/PC/arcade counterparts?
Is the idea that games are more single-threaded (or say lower thread count) which the PS3 can't do well, and these distributed things are very high thread count which it can do well?
Clearly it's a great piece of hardware, but it seems to have a lot of shortcomings as a games machine, despite being designed as one.
Gaming consoles to do graphics processing, makes sense. They must have quite some specialised graphics related horse power, considering their planned output.
They mention what improvement it can do but I wasn't able to find any examples. Anyone at least have that space shuttle example they mentioned?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
How do they deal with nodes failing? Did they buy a bunch of spares? If not, they might be in trouble because you can't buy the OtherOS PS3's anymore.
1) they have spares 2) they know how to hack firmware 3) they're not afeared of apples lawyers
Don't be too quick, PS3's is correct, as far as pluralization of abbreviations go.
Hard resets must be a bitch...
has no games.
Shall we play a game?
Fuckin' Goatse in the library again!!!
This is just another of those occasions when you WISH for a better content filter system... in the same library, when you try to look at a little bit of sleaze like Facebook you are told "Fortinet blah blah forget it".
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
It was 1760 back in December, does that mean 44 have died since then? Are they sure they aren't using Xbox 360s?
The Air Force's Research Lab in Rome
I guess that explains Slashdot's choice of "military" icon...
Paddle faster, I hear banjos
Your post really didn't sit well with me, so I looked it up. I found some conflicting viewpoints in different style guides, but Wikipedia surprisingly seems most concise (because it represents multiple views).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialism#Representing_plurals_and_possessives
Because if they do, the latest firmware gets automatically installed.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I'd say it was at best stupid and at worst extremely irresponsible to build a supercomputer out of Playstation gaming consoles. For as long as CUDA has been around they could've built a significantly more powerful supercomputer with GPUs with more control over the hardware and software and it would've been cheaper. Remember: Even with the OtherOS option the access to the GPU and most of the cell SPEs is disabled, meaning it's extremely crippled, even for the price. Paying for the developer licenses even at a steep discount would've made this a very poor decision.
On Sunday afternoons, in lieu of the cancelled NFL season the USAF supercomputer will be running 15 high-def Madden games in real time.
There's an attitude that's commonplace among with regards to stuff that you are supposed to do a particular thing with it. When you buy a can of Pringles, you are supposed to throw away the can! You buy a microwave for cooking, and the PS3 is for video games, and crayons are for kids to draw with, etc.
It's considered anachronistic to use crayons as an electric insulator, or PS3 for calculating aerodynamics, or use a microwave for generating and studying R/F interference patterns. And making long-range communications equipment from a Pringles can is.... just odd.
Yet none of these alternative uses would be particularly surprising to the engineering type, who think nothing of making a filter out of pantie-hose and a plastic butter container, because our type not only thinks outside the box, we decide what would be the best way to slice up the box in order to satisfy the problem at hand.
Good show Air Force!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Gaming consoles to do graphics processing, makes sense. They must have quite some specialised graphics related horse power, considering their planned output.
Not necessarily. The specialized hardware is designed to take a mathematical model of a world and to render that model into an image. Image processing, or more accurately computer vision - the part of image processing and artificial intelligence that is more relevant here, goes in the opposite direction. Computer vision takes an image and tries to generate mathematical models that describe the objects in the scene. For example recognizing if an object is a rock or a tank or an ambulance.
So I suspect the performance advantage offered by PS3 hardware is from the more general components not the specialized graphics components. Solving these sort of problems are really about number crunching.
... You don't sell something to the US government with certain advertised capabilities, then take away those capabilities, then sue the US government for using them ...
The Air Force is probably not connecting to the internet and getting firmware updates from Sony.
This is so old that Reddit users do not whine when it shows up on Digg.
All but one cell core is available when running under the hypervisor. No direct access to the graphics hardware, tho.
What would be amusing about this is if it was disinformation.
think about it, third world countries snapping PS-3's in the hopes of building something better than a video arcade?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
when will the greater digg effect affect slashdot?
To find out why they are doing this try contacting a vendor that sells Cell based servers. It's as if they are pricing them deliberately so that nobody will buy them. When I tried I could have purchased eight fairly equivalent Intel based systems for the price of one Cell based machine. Meanwhile a playstation with the same processor as a low end Cell server is under ten percent of the price. It's almost as if it a a vector of a price inflate and bribe scam - maybe it is considering how hard the sales guy tried to be my friend (and dropped all kinds of hints that might have been about a bribe) even though he knew I wasn't going to be buying more then a couple of the things.
Now they have even priced themselves out of the range of military budgets.
by releasing the keys which are 'national defense information'?
Does that mean they are violating the DMCA by rolling Firmware back to allow AnyOS? Didn't Sony just flip out at people for trying to use PS3s as actual computers?
There is already a supercomputer called Condor: Condor Project Homepage
Even though the Slashdot Pundits dismiss this as useless, obviously the user community it supports thinks it is a big success. The claim is that Condor is in the to 40 supercomputers and it costs 10 times less then getting the same results using other hardware. Not too shabby.
It's likely that one of the reasons that this is so useful is the the SPE/Cell processors are good at the kind of image processing that the USAF is interested in. They are doing a lot of work in the Fourier domain, which is common for radar processing, so the Cell streaming 64 bit floating point architecture is well suited to the task.
From the article:
This translates to "We're going to use ARM processors as soon as possible".
These researchers see the value in leveraging commercial technology for cost effective high performance computing. If you want good performance per watt driven by a big commercial market the ARM is the way to go. There are GPUs that work with the ARM architecture, as well as ARM vector processing units. I would guess that they plan to use the upcoming generation of 64 bit ARM processors as soon as they are available. They might even start with current generation 32 bit dual CPU 2GHz hardware.
Just because the ARM is not as cool as CUDA doesn't make it useless. IBM has announce that it will not do a next gen PS3/Cell processor, so the USAF funding that effort by itself would be costly and have long lead times. ARM CPUs are only going to get cheaper, faster and be very power efficient. It's the obvious next step.
Why is Snark Required?
Air Force Supercomputer Made From PS3's what? What is this object that belongs to the PS3 that the supercomputer was made from?
This isn't what the PS3 was meant for.
Com'n Sony, I dare you. Sue the Air Force.
On the contrary...
beat it at tic tac toe.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
eddie was the best in tekken3
Supercomputer Made From PS3's what?
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I wonder when this is going to happen... Are they just going to let someone get away with such a blatant piracy effort?
I am waiting. Where is Sony's reaction when we need it? They are suing everybody, gaining their hardware and even access to their financial information. (Using the sad, sad case of George Hotz here as an example.)
Sony has been threatening and suing people using hardware they bought for anything else but gaming official games. For example installing Linux is in their opinion a breach of DMCA -- even though one can't use cracked games with it and can't even access PS3 live services.
With this very same logic they should now approach Air Force with a subpoena and request seizuring the hardware from them.
The pictures in the linked story demonstrate that cable management isn't a "strong point" for this installation. SLOPPY!
at 30 fps. That's an astounding amount of work, much of it similar to what pattern recognition is. So, sure, image analysis with ARMs may make sense.
They should do Folding@Home on them!
Just because the ARM is not as cool as CUDA doesn't make it useless.
Just for notice : the Tegra platform is an ARM cpu core with an Nvidia GPU unit.
Also Imagination Technologie (maker of the PowerVR GPU often coupled to ARM CPU's like on Texas Instrument's OMAP chip) is among the companies collaborating on OpenCL standard.
Qualcom's GPU is a core previously developped by ATI/AMD.
(And AMD's Fusion technologie could be scaled down to lower power requirement in the future).
As smartphone, tablets and such are going to need more parallel processing in the future (for video processing, for example), you can bet that future CPUs are going to include OpenCL-capable parallel cores. And thus, power-conscious super computer might start using them (a trend already started in the past with Transmeta's low power chips. Used back then in the super computer with the more processing power per watt.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
isn't this against sony's terms of service, and no worse than what geohot does, Sony go get all the army hackers computers
The US government believes in customers rights to use hardware how they see fit, not necessarily how the manufacturer wants you to... just like everyone else. The difference is that the US government actually has the resources to fend off a douchebag legal storm.
how do u link up 3 playstations? how about 1000+?
Wikipedia says that the OtherOS had access to 6 of the 7 cell cores (SPEs), and the main processor (PPE). The cell was designed for parallel tasks, and is much better at it than a standard processor. Furthermore, the RSX uses a traditional fixed-function architecture (hardware is dedicated to vertex-shaders and pixel shaders), unlike newer GPGPUs that have a bunch of ALUs that can be used for any task. This makes it much harder to write general computation code. Also, the bandwidth to the RSX is much less than to the SPEs, which further limits how much data you can crunch with it.
I know the folding@home programmers decided that it wasn't worth the time and effort to do number crunching on the RSX (they are a native application not running in OtherOS, so they had full access to the machine), as they expected the increase in performance to be minimal.
It is possible that they either bought a dev-kit and wrote native applications (and Sony decided to sign their code), or they Sony gave them access to master keys so they can do whatever they want, but it isn't necessary.
Ah, nevermind, I found an Air Force article that quotes the guy who built the cluster that confirms that they are using stock firmware/linux:
"The server runs on a Linux operating system that isn't available on the newer firmware of current systems," said Mr. Barnell. "We have to abide by the end-user license agreement like everyone else, so we're only able to use the systems as we get them."
If a Condor PS3 breaks it can't be sent in for repairs because it comes back with system updates that are unable to run Linux. After an update, it's useless in the Condor cluster.
"I have a few spares," he said. "But as they break, we'll end up removing consoles from the cluster."
wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor#PowerXCell_8i claims they are used to make some super computers. ... unconventional approach, is it cost ?
so why use this