What do you get when you string over 1,700 PS3’s together? You get the Air Forces new supercomputer. Dr. Richard Linderman from the Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate was tasked to design a supercomputer on a limited budget. He decided to take a look at the processor inside a PS3 and found that he could use the cell processor as a backbone for a new supercomputer called the Condor Cluster. Initially Dr. Linderman and his researchers spent about $300,000 for the PS3 systems, "With 336 consoles, we reached 53 TFLOPS, with an additional $2 million in funding from the Department of Defense's High Performance Computing Modernization Program, we increased the cluster to 2,016 consoles and 500 TFLOPS in performance” said Dr. Linderman. The system is being used for fast analysis of high resolution imagery, and is reportedly the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world. While all the Blu-ray drives were removed, the Defense Department can still stream movies with Netflix, making the Condor Cluster the ‘coolest’ supercomputer.
Dig