U.S. Air Force building supercomputer from PS3s

[SellmeyourDVD]

It's a good thing they didn't use any 360's, or else eventually it would of been the biggest and greatest display of RROD 360's in the world


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.

[SteelPen]

Very interesting read!

[KingBing]

This old news but intersting news indeed

[SellmeyourDVD]

Originally Posted by KingBing

This old news but intersting news indeed

It was on the front page of yahoo, so I thought it was new

I even searched the forum for a similar thread

I feel like a padwan in this forum.

In my best Yoda voice possible " Learn the ways of the blu-ray forum, you must."

[sfmarine]

New news to me. Very interesting.

[GLaDOS]

Hope this boosts up PS3 sales for the month.

[proxpilot]

the RROD will be displayed in a pretty yellow color instead

[Uniquely]

Originally Posted by KingBing

This old news but intersting news indeed

Almost as old as the RRoD joke used to introduce it.

[mikejet]

I hope they keep their receipt! They might want to return them once they find out how hard they are to program for!

In all seriousness, it would have been cheap to goto to Fry's and just build a bunch of PC's than to do this. Or goto IBM directly.

[KingBing]

Originally Posted by mikejet

I hope they keep their receipt! They might want to return them once they find out how hard they are to program for!

Ohh but its worth it my friend

[xtop]

Originally Posted by robinandtami

Almost as old as the RRoD joke used to introduce it.

you know..they are talking about the 360 outside of the 360 thread..sounds worth reporting for, right?

but sheesh..at this point i think any mention of the system equaling a ban would be better than hearing the rrod crap

well whatever. since this is pretty old news, are they buying more or something? why is this news again

[mikejet]

Originally Posted by KingBing

Ohh but its worth it my friend

I have one and to play games and movies it's worth it but to do something like this, would have been cheaper to build their own network of computers all running Linux/Unix.

[cokelover]

lol, the staff probably play games and watch blu's on them when they're "on R&R"

[metalgeargreed]

Originally Posted by kotsedriver

Hope this boosts up PS3 sales for the month.

If you can find one. They are hard to come by here in kansas. use to be able to get them in regularly. I guess Sony likes to loose sales.

[metalgeargreed]

Originally Posted by mikejet

I hope they keep their receipt! They might want to return them once they find out how hard they are to program for!

In all seriousness, it would have been cheap to goto to Fry's and just build a bunch of PC's than to do this. Or goto IBM directly.

1. They are Air Force. I think they know what they are doing.
2. You really think you can build a computer that does what the PS3 does for less than $300? If so, let me know the secret.

[curse]

Originally Posted by metalgeargreed

1. They are Air Force. I think they know what they are doing.
2. You really think you can build a computer that does what the PS3 does for less than $300? If so, let me know the secret.

doesnt mean squat... military also thinks bose is a nice company.

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by mikejet

In all seriousness, it would have been cheap to goto to Fry's and just build a bunch of PC's than to do this. Or goto IBM directly.

I don't know how old the article is, but just to put it in perspective, my BIL is a computer engineering professor and his grad student did the same thing back in 2007. It was no where near the scale, (I think it was 2-3 PS3s) but it was the cheapest way to get cell processors and their processing power at the time. Google Cell and numerical analysis and you will find many papers on it. Simply because of the core/SPU structure they end up being a lot more performing then other chips