USAF Creates ‘Super Computer’ out of PS3’s.
The ‘Air Force Research Laboratory’ has recently connected 1,760 Playstation 3’s together to create what is said the fastest, most interactive computer in the Defense Department.
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The Condor Cluster, as the group of systems is known, also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers in an parallel array capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (500 TFLOPS), according to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell.
Mark Barnell says that the total cost of The Condor Cluster is an estimate of $2 Million; which is 10% more expensive than a ‘super computer’ made out of regular computer parts. This has also taken 1/10 of the power connected to all the other super computers.
After the ribbon cutting on Wednesday, the super computer (housed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Rome, New York.) will be used for research in all branches & centers in all parts of the country.
The defense engineers worked with Sony, buying all of the Playstation 3’s, they were uncapable of buying the ‘Slim’ models, because they did not work with Mac’s, specifically ‘OSX’.
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In 2000, it was widely reported that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was planning to string then-cutting-edge PlayStation 2 systems into a defense supercomputer, though UK intelligence sources dismissed the claims as “nonsense.”
Why didn’t they use Xbox’s for a supercomputer to use with Mac OSX? The world may never know.


