December 2, 2010 weblog
US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3's to build supercomputer
(Phys.org)—About the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world right now is the US Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) newest system, which has a core made of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles. In addition to its large capacity, the so-called "Condor Cluster" is capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS), making it the fastest interactive computer in the entire US Defense Department.
The supercomputer, which is located in Rome, New York, was formally presented yesterday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It will be used by Air Force centers across the country for tasks such as radar enhancement, pattern recognition, satellite imagery processing, and artificial intelligence research.
Its speed allows it to analyze ultra-high-resolution images very quickly - at a rate of billions of pixels per minute - to greatly reduce the amount of time required. Due in part to the video game consoles' cutting-edge graphics capabilities, the supercomputer also has improved algorithms that can better identify blurred flying objects in space than previous computers could.
The Condor Cluster project began four years ago, when PlayStation consoles cost about $400 each. At the same time, comparable technology would have cost about $10,000 per unit. Overall, the PS3s for the supercomputer's core cost about $2 million. According to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell, that cost is about 5-10% of the cost of an equivalent system built with off-the-shelf computer parts.
Another advantage of the PS3-based supercomputer is its energy efficiency: it consumes just 10% of the power of comparable supercomputers.
In addition to the PS3s, the supercomputer also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers to direct traffic within the system. The PS3s are the older, larger variety, since the newer slim models don't allow for the installation of Linux.
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User comments
Also, I don't think the AFRL is going to buying any of Sony's software for the PS3 either.
The CELL is more capable than traditional processors because it has many cores capable of GPU like instructions, working on sets of data at a time.
@dirk bruere, you are a retard and clearly dont understand whats goin on here.----------------------------------------------
@panorama, you to are also a retard, Ps3 OS do not support clusters. and even if they did, why?
People like you RobertKarlStonjek, are why we can never move past stereotypes and social norms. Because of people like you we have wars over silly things everyday.
Not everyone who works on computers are nerds, especially in this day and age.
lol with people like zslewis91 its kind of hard to ignore the stereotype
Joke is not good joke.
As fot PFY's, I refer you to this...
http://www.thereg...ds/bofh/
Pray you never meet him :)
larger := broader
http://google.com...te"
What a waste of oxygen.
If this costs, and I quote: "...5-10% of the cost of an equivalent system built with off-the-shelf computer parts" then it has *cost less* than it would have, had they *not* used PS3's....
Fail high-school maths did we? (And obviously English, come to think of it...)
With the added bonus of playing games at break times :)
The Air Force using the technology for a supercomputer is awesome for both us US taxpayers and for Sony. Win win.
Funny I thought it was because the ram operates at 3200MHz (fast as GDDR5) but is generations old, or that it has 256, 256 bit registers while a current database server Itanium has 128-128 bit registers
BOFH has been around since 1983 at least. The original author was the best. All these rip-offs are not very funny after reading the originals.
Whoa whoa whoa...easy there friend, I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was commenting on the fact that although Sony probably enjoys the PR that something like this brings. I'm sure they can't ignore the fact that these 1760 PS3's will never generate any additional revenue. For Example, the software available through PSN or Retail Game Discs. I wasn't commenting on the Software of the PS3 itself. Sorry for the confusion. Thanks for calling me retarded as opposed to just asking what I meant...mature.
For example, let's say instead of being grouped in to a Cluster that these are normal consumer PS3's. Going off of the average of buying a retail game ($60 in the USA) and a PSN game (Average of $10 in the USA) every other month. In one year that would be $739,200 of sales for Sony and it's partners. That's what I was trying to convey. Why would I even comment on the PS3 software if they state in the article that they are running Linux?
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