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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!
. .
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!
Gives new meaning to the term "War Gaming"
I accidentally other os. Is this dangerous?
No, because they don't *have* to update the firmware and as long as they're not planning to connect to the Playstation Network with it, they don't even *need* to update to the latest firmware that removes that functionality. Of course, if they did have to, I bet it sure would come in handy if there was some guy who could "jailbreak" the system to allow people to make further use of it. *ahem*
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 . . . .
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".
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1) they have spares 2) they know how to hack firmware 3) they're not afeared of apples lawyers
Apple's lawyers? When did Apple's lawyers start enforcing Sony's EULAs for Sony against Sony's users???
It was 1760 back in December, does that mean 44 have died since then? Are they sure they aren't using Xbox 360s?
Despite being slightly trolly about your opinion of PS3 games, you are probably nonetheless correct.
The PS3 is massively parallelised (spelling Nazis - go!) compared to XBOX, and is therefore harder to fully utilize by games progammers than the more serial XBOX but for supercomputing there is likely a notable difference, hence the adoption.
The parent troll's comment about RROD probably had a ring of truth to it, too, as the Cell CPU is on IBM originally intended for, you guessed it, supercomputing and re-purposed for this task.
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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.
That doesn't sound right. I haven't used it myself, but I understood that the other OS had access to all the Cell cores, it just couldn't access the RSX GPU, which wouldn't really matter for a number crunching cluster.
It might - the GPU is usually the bit that crunches vectors best, and that is something I imagine to be fairly useful for the kinds of purposes the Air Force might put it to. Anyone know if the Cell is more suited to this task?
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
From those discussions I also recall that the PS3 is not considered strong in general purpose number crunching work; your run-of-the-mill Intel is doing much better across the board. It's these specific tasks where [specialized] units like the PS3 can shine. Them being marketed as gaming consoles of course helps in keeping volume up and cost down, making them almost disposable and at least easily replaceable in case of hardware failure.
(emphasis mine) -- There is an issue with this statement. You assume that newly purchased units can actually be used beyond the capacity to run Sony signed code.
Let's not forget that the PS3 should only be used for gaming according to their manufacturer. As I recall, Sony removed the "other-os" option and are suing those that wish to re-enable that option. Thus, the units that the USAF are using are not disposable because they can not be easily replaced in case of hardware failure...
In any event the PS3 is not currently a suitable choice for use in a mesh-super-computer, even when only performing the specific calculations that it excels at, given the current legal situation and state of copyright law.
Interesting to note: Sony won their battle against the movie industry when Sony's Beta Cassettes were targeted as a helping/promoting piracy on the grounds that Beta Cassettes had the capacity for non-infringing uses. The USAF is now using Sony PS3s in a substantial display of non-infringing use, which lends credence to the idea that cracking the PS3 firmware has the capacity for non-infringing uses.
I hope George Hotz's lawyers site the USAF PS3 supercomputer and the Beta Cassettes ruling and win us all Game Console DMCA exemption in the process. (Ironic that Sony's own favorable legal precedent could now bite them in the ass.)
AFAK The original design of the ps3 didn't even have a GPU, the cell is more than capable. Those 10,000$ IBM cell blades, they are designed for high level graphics processing, to be sold to the likes of Pixar and such. (Note: I do not know if Pixar is using them, its an example.) I'm not sure why Sony ended up going with Nvidia GPU's. Possibly because they were already late to the game, the game dev's were pretty pissed off about having almost nothing they could port easily, and Nvidia was the compromise. I had Linux in mine, with a bit of hacking you could get the frame buffer to run out of the GPU's memory, witch made the memory crunch suck less. Had Other OS remained I'm sure some one could have built a 3D driver on top of a couple of the cells. I read rumours that a plan was being hatched before Sony pissed on the fire and raised a stink.
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?
I think both of you are missing the fact that it's the Cell processor and not necessarily the graphics card which is the draw here. One master core; lots of slave cores. Surely a joy to program highly-parallel applications on.
Of course, the graphics card can be utilized with OpenCL (but I rather suspect that is mere icing on the cake).
They have given access to numerous other agencies and universities (Cornell, Dartmouth College, Florida, Maryland, Tennesse) to the system - whose access will be over the internet.