Thread: U.S. Air Force building supercomputer from PS3s

No doubt the Air Force purchasing department gets some odd requests from time to time, but we'd love to have seen the grin on the face of the officer tasked with procuring some 1,700 Playstation 3s for a USAF facility in Rome, NY.
Before you complain about your tax dollars being spent on toys, the machines aren't for gaming. Instead, the facility -- an Air Force research lab -- will join them into a parallel-computing cluster that, when complete, will number well over 2,000 PS3s.
The supercomputer -- snappily monikered "500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster" -- will be put to work playing 2,000 simultaneous games of God of War III. Wait, no. Among other things, they'll be attempting to simulate the way the human brain processes information and how it pulls off the remarkably difficult task of recognizing the content of images.
"Humans can routinely do these things, but a computer struggles to do it," the facility's computing director Mark Barnell told Stars and Stripes. "In a general sense, we are interested in making it autonomous."
The cluster won't be as powerful as a regular supercomputing rig, but it will be cheaper and more environmentally friendly: it'll consume as much as 95% less electrical power and shut down unused machines when the cluster isn't running at full capacity.

U.S. Air Force building supercomputer from PS3s - Plugged In - Yahoo! Games

Apparently somebody high up in the air force is a sony fanboy. Also that would be one hell of a lan party.

Wow, that's ridiculous! And very very interesting, thanks for the post. I'm not even a big ps3 fan, but this is still pretty cool.

That's fantastic. I don't know if I hope they succeed or fail in giving computers the ability to actually recognize what they're seeing and be able to define it the way a person can.

Such a thing is already done on small scale, there have been robots taught to recognize the basic components of what a chair is, and what it's for. Or how to go and get things for you after you type in a small command of what you want into the prompt, etc.

I had come across this info also . I was my understanding that the hardware used to make the ps3 was woth more than what sony is selling them for . Sony is banking on making thier money with the sales of the games . The AF had to strike a deal with Sony to dump the ps3 software . There suposedly a clause that if the software is moded they can make it a "brick" They want to run a linx based networking of a couple thousand of them . I thought it was crazy at first but if it works with exesting hardware and not waisting millions on research good on them bean counters

Purchasing PS3's to build a supercomputer is actually a very cost effective solution to deliver computer services to the Air Force. A PS3 is only $300-$500, while a enterprise 1u xeon server will cost them in the thousands, roughly $2000-$6000, depending on the specs. In terms of computing power to cost ratio, it heavily favored the ps3.

In addition, the Air Force has done their homework. They already had an experimental cluster of 300 ps3.

Ahh the military. There's already been alot of research with respect to face recognition technology. I guess now the US military also wants a computer to be responsible for identifying things that need to die. From the air no less. My advice, don't look up.

lol cooool