Air Force Unveils Fastest Defense Supercomputer, Made of 1,760 PlayStation 3s
 

http://www.popsci.com/technology/art...playstation-3s

http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecac...0ba63131af.jpg

The holidays may be driving video game console sales, but apparently so is the military. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has strung together 1,760 PlayStation 3 gaming systems to create what it?s calling the fastest interactive computer system in the entire DoD, capable of executing 500 trillion floating point operations per second.

Known as the Condor Cluster, the array also packs 168 GPUs and 84 servers to direct traffic within the system, allowing all that power to work in parallel. At a total cost of about $2 million, the AFRL estimates the cluster costs something like five to 10 percent of equivalent computers built from scratch. It also consumes just 10 percent of the power.

The array employs the older model PS3s (the larger ones) because new models don?t allow the installation of Linux, a key component for turning the consoles into pliable computing hubs. The AFRL will use the Condor Cluster for quickly processing high-res satellite imagery, radar enhancement, and even research into artificial intelligence.

imagine the wow bots you could run!! lol ;)

lol to the max

W T F is that!!!???

i call BS on this... they just wanted a reason to buy a bunch of PS3's and network games off of for the uber network party 2010

Hahahaha!!!

Im just a human being...

haha i saw this before, but please tell me they could've done it cheaper/more efficiently...

How would you like to reformat 1760 PS3s? I'll bet they bitched up a storm.

I call bullshit. If the US military's best computer is made up of 1700 Playstations, we are totally fucked.

but can it play Metal Gear?

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

you're in for an unpleasant surprise ;)

Im finding a lot of links about this and more fun stuff, like a homemade TSA style scanner that someone made
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/12/see-your-friend.php

Fucking awesome.

Since when does the government care about cost efficiency?

Thats Sexy

There, fixed that.

This computer sure calculates fast.

Well did you hear they didnt want to sell xboxes in iran n shit, cuase the cpu's are fast and could be used for hacking or some bullshit.

They might not even be selling em still now..

Imagine the bot you could be running on that :thumbsup

How much did Sony pay them to make that?

it sounds more like a university project, not a project of some serious organization like the DoD...

and one day all that will fit in the palms of your hands.. laugh now.

when i look at that reminds me of the first computers.

So where is the rest of them? Front two racks only have 48 units each in them. BS alert.