Air Force Supercomputer Made From PS3's

The Air Force's Research Lab in Rome, NY. has one of the cheapest supercomputers ever made, and best of all over 3,000 of your friends can play Tekken on it. The computer is made from 1,716 PlayStation 3s linked together, and is used to process images from spy planes. From the article: "The Air Force calls the souped-up PlayStations the Condor Supercomputer and says it is among the 40 fastest computers in the world. The Condor went online late last year, and it will likely change the way the Air Force and the Air National Guard watch things on the ground." We covered this story back in December when the Condor first went online.

Re:DMCA broken

[snkiz]

AFAK The original design of the ps3 didn't even have a GPU, the cell is more than capable. Those 10,000$ IBM cell blades, they are designed for high level graphics processing, to be sold to the likes of Pixar and such. (Note: I do not know if Pixar is using them, its an example.) I'm not sure why Sony ended up going with Nvidia GPU's. Possibly because they were already late to the game, the game dev's were pretty pissed off about having almost nothing they could port easily, and Nvidia was the compromise. I had Linux in mine, with a bit of hacking you could get the frame buffer to run out of the GPU's memory, witch made the memory crunch suck less. Had Other OS remained I'm sure some one could have built a 3D driver on top of a couple of the cells. I read rumours that a plan was being hatched before Sony pissed on the fire and raised a stink.

Re:Upgrades.

[jesseck]

So, to counter this, the Air Force needs to convince DHS and FBI that clusters of PS3s are more efficient at processing biometric databases. That would help ensure that, no matter what Sony does to keep OtherOS and Jailbreak out of the PS3, doing so would be a hindrance to our national security.

Re:Upgrades.

[jelizondo]

Oh no, no suing. Air Force gentlemen are much more devious...

In the next firmware update, the Air Force bombs Tokyo instead of Libya and blame it on Sony!

See what Sony can do against that

Re:old news is old

[Kryptonian Jor-El]

Well, the current set up is fine. However if the Air Force wanted to replace broken PS3s or even expand the cluster, they couldn't. They could argue about Sony ruining their future scalability of their cluster due to the removal of OtherOS.