(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3s to build supercomputer
Source(s): You must login or register to view this content. and You must login or register to view this content. // By: Kunducted // Monday, February 20th, 2012

I thought this was pretty interesting. This may be late, but nonetheless, it's interesting to hear about. The third largest supercomputer in the world is the US Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) newest system. This supercomputer has the core of 1,760 Playstation 3 consoles. They're calling it the Condor Cluster. The 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.

This high-tech supercomputer which is located in Rome, New York will be used for performing tasks such as radar enhancement, pattern recognition, satellite imagery processing, and artificial intelligence research. Who knows what else.

The speed of the supercomputer allows it to analyze ultra-high-resolution images very quickly - at a rate of billions of pixels per minute - which reduces the time by a lot. 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.

PlayStation consoles cost about $400 each when the Condor Cluster was being built. At that time, the same technology would have cost about $10,000 per unit. All of the PS3's 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 PS3 consoles themselves, 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.

hardcore MW3 boosting session imminent

Maybe Skyrim would finally work...