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:3, Insightful)
At the time of the PS3's release, it was very affordable for the Cell Architecture and performance it provided, and you could put your own operating system on it.
You know how Sony lost money on every PS3 sold... but then made the costs back with like 10 dollars from every game?
And you notice how the government bought 1,760 thousand of these things (or more) for a non-gaming purpose?
Did you hear the firmware updates and new PS3s remove the "Other OS" option?
Or did you think that those 3 incidents were entirely unrelated?
Man I ask a lot of questions.
You fail to understand the economies of scale.
While it is true in a sense that Sony spent more on each PS3 than they charged for them at the beginning of the cycle of the product, most of those costs are sunk costs in manufacturing. The more PS3s they sold, the less they were losing (rather than the other way around, which is the infantile economics view a lot of people claimed).
Now they have sold so many PS3s that the sunk costs are more than paid for, but it's not sensible to say current PS3s are profitable and older ones were not. They paid for development and equipment, and each PS3 sold at any time was revenue Sony used to recoup losses and eventually make a profit.
Think of it like this. You buy a $100 grill and $200 in meat to cook and sell hamburgers. You eventually sell 1000 burgers at $2. The combined cost of the first burger might seem like $300 or $100.20, but it was actually $0.21 the entire time if you think long term (which, of course, is how Sony saw it). the real fear at the beginning was that the PS3 would flop like the original XBOX did (imagine if you only sold 40 burgers). but it hasn't. It's a huge success and on track to sell almost as many units as the other two Playstations.
No, Sony did not cancel other OS to stop the Air Force from building this supercomputer. they did it to prevent analysis of their security architecture that facilitated pirating games.
Why are Sony so horribly short-sighted (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I know, they're the only console maker that has a branch of the American armed forces using their hardware for a literal supercomputer cluster, which is a stunning, resounding endorsement for the real world horsepower behind their hardware, and they've disabled the very "other OS" feature that allowed the air force to build the cluster in the first place.
What the hell, Sony, you idiots.
Re:Don't Update (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't say "no matter how you look at it".
Super computing is also a lot about pushing those large quantities of data around and the programming that allows you to use that theoretical 500 TFLOPS of power. You could end up with something that can do significant calculations but just uses 100baseT to push data around. That's just isn't very efficient for many uses of super computers, and certainly not a world class number cruncher. Just to give you something to compare it against, super computers today are looking to have 10 Tbps switches on backplanes. That's 10 Tbps of information passing through the switch hooking up a rack of servers.
IMHO, hardware super computer engineering hurdles are about four things: processing power, data pipelines, memory, and dissipating heat. You can't fail any one of those four if you want something usable. (Software engineering hurdles I'll leave to experts as I am not one.)
d
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't Update (Score:4, Insightful)
The publicity is worth quite a lot to them. It gets the PS3 a few mentions in the press in a context that suggests that the hardware is still considered extremely powerful. The mystical computational capability of the Cell is a large part of how Sony has promoted the PS3.