Communications of the ACM
1,760 Playstation 3s Form New Supercomputer
The Playstation 3 Condor Cluster ranks as the world's 35th fastest supercomputer.
Credit: HighTech EDGE
The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base recently unveiled a supercomputer, named the Condor Cluster, consisting of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3s. The Condor Cluster is the 35th fastest supercomputer in the world and can achieve about 1.5 GigaFLOPS, according to the laboratory's high-performance computing director Mark Barnell. "We're striving hard to make affordable and constrained systems, where they can really use them and make a difference," Barnell says.
The Condor Cluster will process high-resolution satellite images and enhance surveillance capabilities. Some researchers want to use the supercomputer for neuromorphic computing, which mimics the brain's ability to solve complex problems. "We have quite a few research and development efforts working on those kind of applications to do confabulation and prediction, and that will open up a variety of areas which could help with a lot of other efforts and a lot of the areas in which the Air Force would like to go," Barnell says.
Barnell notes that the Condor Cluster also is energy efficient and ranks as the world's seventh "greenest" supercomputer.
From Air Force Times
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