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US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3's to build supercomputer

megadarkwood
By megadarkwood
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Not enough titans

playstations.jpg

 

(PhysOrg.com) -- About the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world right now is the US Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) newest system, which has a core made of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles. In addition to its large capacity, the so-called "Condor Cluster" is capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS), making it the fastest interactive computer in the entire US Defense Department.

 

The supercomputer, which is located in Rome, New York, was formally presented yesterday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It will be used by Air Force centers across the country for tasks such as radar enhancement, pattern recognition, satellite imagery processing, and artificial intelligence research.

Its speed allows it to analyze ultra-high-resolution images very quickly - at a rate of billions of pixels per minute - to greatly reduce the amount of time required. Due in part to the video game consules' cutting-edge graphics capabilities, the supercomputer also has improved algorithms that can better identify blurred flying objects in space than previous computers could.

The Condor Cluster project began four years ago, when PlayStation consoles cost about $400 each. At the same time, comparable technology would have cost about $10,000 per unit. Overall, the PS3s for the supercomputer’s core cost about $2 million. According to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell, that cost is about 5-10% of the cost of an equivalent system built with off-the-shelf computer parts.

Another advantage of the PS3-based supercomputer is its energy efficiency: it consumes just 10% of the power of comparable supercomputers.

In addition to the PS3s, the supercomputer also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers to direct traffic within the system. The PS3s are the older, larger variety, since the newer slim models don’t allow for the installation of Linux.

http://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html

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so this is what they are doing with our money.

Wanna hang out with me and people like @Theslsamg, @ Ssoele, @BENTHEREN, @Lanoi, @Whiskers, @_ASSASSIN_, @Looney, @WunderWuffle, and @nsyedhasan. Well.... Check out: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/48484-unofficial-linustechtips-teamschnitzel-server-teamspeak/

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how is this even remotely good in price/performance ratio?

Grammar nazis are people too!
Treat your local grammar nazi nicely and he might teach you a thing or two. (Note that I'm Belgian and not a native English speaker.)
Chivalry isn't dead!

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are-you-serious...

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Filthy pesants  PC = THE MASTER RACE :P jk

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That article is from 2010...

So what? It's still kinda cool.

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Not bad. Too bad now I know where our tax dollars go and I'm not happy.

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So what? It's still kinda cool.

Not really it has 1760 consoles and is only 500Tflops.

You would get more performance with 100x R9-290X.

 

RTX2070OC 

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So, is sony's System for streaming games considered a supercomputer?

Stock coolers - The sound of bare minimum

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This is so old

 

Why is there a need to fill the "News" section full of articles that were written years ago

"It seems we living the American dream, but the people highest up got the lowest self esteem. The prettiest people do the ugliest things, for the road to riches and diamond rings."- Kanye West, "All Falls Down"

 

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This is old news but when they did this it wasn't a terrible idea. The CPU in the PS3 was pretty powerful, was it not?

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A PS3 has 230 gflops for christ sake.

“Snorting instant coffee is the best,” said Kayla Johns, 19, of Portland.

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Could we please make it a rule to only have recent news in the "news and reviews" subsection? I heard about this years ago and this is hardly relevant anymore.

 

After all, here is the definition of news from the merriam webster:

 

news

: new information or a report about something that has happened recently

"Common sense is not so common." -Voltaire

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I wonder if it still only gets 30fps at 720p?

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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congratulations. You have made a monstrosity of a machine out of 1760 PS3s, that is less powerful than 50 gk110 gpus.

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this is OLD

Dec 02, 2010 by Lisa Zyga

If your grave doesn't say "rest in peace" on it You are automatically drafted into the skeleton war.

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dude.... this is ancient i heard about this years ago why is this in news it shouldn't it be in General Discussion or somthing?

oh dear was that YOUR computer i just downloaded a few dozen viruses on when you weren't paying attention?

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