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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...
Watch out for that next firmware update!
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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*
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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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.
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?