military supercomputer built from PS3 consoles

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military supercomputer built from PS3 consoles

Postby Antony » Tue 28 Dec, 2010 12:12 am

US Air Force researchers have created the Defence Department's largest interactive supercomputer - the 35th fastest in the world - from 1760 Sony PlayStation 3s.

The amalgamation of consoles, nicknamed the "Condor Cluster," will be used to "process high-resolution satellite images and boost surveillance capabilities" according to The Air Force Times.
It will allow scientists to monitor a 15.5-mile area in real time.

The "Condor Cluster" is energy efficient and at $US2 million, has a price tag well below that of traditional computing equipment.

The "Condor Cluster" can achieve about 1.5 GigaFLOPS - floating point operations per second, the unit by which supercomputing power is measured - per watt of computing power, about fifteen times more powerful than a typical supercomputer.


PS3 concoles become military supercomputer (news.com.au)
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Re: militaqry supercomputer built from PS3 consoles

Postby Don_HH2K » Tue 28 Dec, 2010 4:08 pm

I have a feeling the 1.5GFLOPs benchmark was misquoted, as the Cell CPU as found in a single PS3 is theoretically capable of about 200GFLOPs on its own, let alone in a cluster of 1760.
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