[Yahoo]U.S. Air Force building supercomputer from 2,000 PS3s

vlaurelio · Feb 1, 2010

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/u-s-air-force-building-supercomputer-from-ps3s/1387199

Yahoo said:

U.S. Air Force building supercomputer from PS3s
by Mike Smith

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.
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DudeWah · Feb 1, 2010

I'm pretty sure there was already a thread on this.

But still, pretty interesting...

J.Will.Xu · Feb 1, 2010

Intellectual move by the Air Force to put together all those toys to form a supercomputer.

Over 2,000 PS3s, just simply incredible and amazing!

vlaurelio · Feb 1, 2010

hamza said:

I'm pretty sure there was already a thread on this.

But still, pretty interesting...
Click to expand...

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Chopped · Feb 1, 2010

what sucks is that this is the sole reason sony stopped supporting "other os" on the ps3..

deadlybulb · Feb 1, 2010

I, for one, welcome our new Skynet overlords.

Surfguy · Feb 1, 2010

"Hello, Joshua."

"Hello, Professed PS3 Gamer. How about a nice game of chess?"

"Later. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War."

"Are you sure? Wouldn't you rather play chess?"

"I said later...damn you! Put on the damn Global Thermonuclear War game!"

"Okay. Which side do you want?"

"Alright...we're in. Who should we be? The Russians? Yea!"

...

"You see that light up there. Normally, that would read DefCon 5 but, since that crazy little stunt you pulled, it now reads DefCon 4. You know what it means when it gets to DefCon 1?"

"No...what?"

"I crapped my pants."

RocketsPimp · Feb 1, 2010

vlaurelio said:

you're right

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=181273&highlight=supercomputer

lock 'er up
Click to expand...

Lock em all up.

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=178431

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[Yahoo]U.S. Air Force building supercomputer from 2,000 PS3s

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