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| Science & Technology |
| USAF Builds Supercomputer Out Of 1,760 PlayStation 3s |
| 2010-12-29 |
| US Air Force researchers have created the Defense Department’s largest interactive supercomputer, the 35th fastest in the world, from 1,760 Song PlayStation 3s. The amalgamation of consoles, nicknamed the “Condor Cluster,” will be used to process high-resolution satellite images and boost surveillance capabilities. It will allow scientists to monitor a 15.5 square mile area in real time. The director of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio said that the computer is also capable of reading 20 pages per second with up to 30 percent of the characters removed and recovering all the words without error. The Condor Cluster is energy efficient and at $2 million, has a price tag well below that of traditional computing equipment. It can achieve about 1.5 GigaFLOPS, floating point operations per second, the unit by which supercomputing power is measured, per watt of computing power, about fifteen times more powerful than a typical supercomputer. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose |
| #9 P2kontheroad: All new PS3 units have the newer firmware. So, either you buy special units from Sony or you downgrade the firmware to reintroduce "Other OS". The latter violates Sony's terms of service and the DMCA. So, back to my question. Did they get special units or just start this project long enough ago and decline the updates? If that's the case, then this is perhaps the last such project we'll see using the PS3. |
| Posted by: Spock the Ruthless6200 2010-12-29 15:50 |
| #8 P2K, can you elaborate please? I have one of the ps3's that can play ps2 games. I allow it to be updated over the internet, but wasn't aware that this might replace the base OS. Have I misunderstood you? |
| Posted by: Whiskey Mike 2010-12-29 14:24 |
| #7 ...technically, its the firmware 'updates' that killed the functionality. |
| Posted by: P2kontheroad 2010-12-29 12:50 |
| #6 About six months after the PS3 came out, the community was recruited to support Folding at Home, a program to run sims of proteins in an investigation of medical issues hosted through Stanford. It's one of the largest distributed processing networks. It's running at about 850 teraflops, not peak value. Wonder how this is done now that Sony has removed Linux from the PS3? Only if you updated their OS which killed the ability. If you kept the OS to the prior version, you can still do Linux and retain backward compatibility on the original 60gb model. |
| Posted by: P2kontheroad 2010-12-29 12:48 |
| #5 "DUAL", DAMMIT! Well what do you expect from someone named Trotsky, anyhow? |
| Posted by: Trotsky 2010-12-29 11:45 |
| #4 Dula usage. You could pull a unit and use it to control a Reaper. |
| Posted by: Ebbonter Trotsky1514 2010-12-29 11:44 |
| #3 Wonder how this is done now that Sony has removed Linux from the PS3? Order dev boxes? |
| Posted by: Spock the Ruthless6200 2010-12-29 11:40 |
| #2 I read about this a few months ago. You can always depend on the military to come up with new and interesting ways of doing things. Take that China! |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2010-12-29 11:04 |
| #1 PS3s have always been good for this. |
| Posted by: Water Modem 2010-12-29 10:52 |