USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s

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?

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Re:Why?

[AK Marc]

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.

No, they were losing actual money on each one. That is, they spent some amount of money to design and tool for it. Then, for each one they put out, they spent more on the materials and construction than they took in. They weren't making money but not paying off the initial cost. They were actually losing money on each one. They required game sales to make up the difference. And they did.

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.

The hardware profits (if any) have still not reached the level of the hardware development and production costs. They have not now, or ever, made money on putting out PS3 hardware.

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.

You are wrong. It's like buying a $1000 grill and $1000 in meat to sell 100 hamburgers at $5 each. You spent $2000 to make $500. There is no way to buy another batch of $1000 meat and sell another set of burgers at $5 to make up the difference. However, Sony knows this. They sold it with fries and a drink. The cost for fries and a drink is $1 per order, and the combo is sold at $12. So if everyone who walks up buys only a burger, Sony would have gone out of business (provided they made enough burgers). However, almost everyone gets the combo, so Sony makes about a 10% profit overall on the burger, even though they are selling them at a loss.

This isn't like car sales, which is how you described (except for the Volt, which loses money for each one sold with no way to ever make it up, so they are written off as R&D expenses or such). It takes over a billion dollars to design and tool for a new car, so the first one is either sold at a billion dollar loss, or all of them get some percentage of that cost attached to them causing the net profit to be called a loss until some volume is achieved. But the Volt and the PS3 were sold for an actual loss. The more volume sold, the greater the loss.