US Air Force building PS3 supercomputer

[Jeremy1983]

Interesting article: http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/p...m-ps3s/1387199

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.

[jono_0101]

ive seen this posted several times before, its kind of old news, but still interesting to see what different things the PS3 can do

[CYMBOL]

I need to get one at my work center.

They do have "game rooms" in a good number of desert locations - 360's, and PS3's. I tend to see more people on the PS3s. Maybe when they are side by side - the PS3's just look cooler.

Either way - too bad no one hardly ever gets a chance to play them. Not much interest walking to the game room tent to play video games after a 12-14 hour day.