USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s 163
digitaldc writes with this excerpt from Gamasutra:
"The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 systems together to create what the organization is calling the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department. The Condor Cluster, as the group of systems is known, also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (500 TFLOPS), according to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell."
Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
This is their third try. (Score:5, Funny)
Previous efforts included a supercomputer made up of 1760 Wiis, but the resulting cluster had less computing power than the researchers' mobile phones and had to be abandoned.
A second attempt at putting together a cluster of 1760 X-Boxes was scuttled when investigations showed no less than 600 of them were showing Red Rings of Doom at any given time.
The Air Force team is confident that using PS3s is a better idea due to their size, weight, and the fact that nobody can find any games that they want to play on them anyway.
(Are there any fanboys I haven't offended with this? I'm trying to be thorough.)
Re:Don't upgrade the firmware. (Score:4, Funny)
Pipped by one minute. That's gotta sting.