Air Force Unveils Fastest Defense Supercomputer, Made of 1,760 PlayStation 3s

huh. who would of thought that ps3s could make a supercomputer.

Glad to know that PS3's (Not even XBOX's) are keeping me safe...I guess when they get bored they can play some Ace Combat and Black Ops to keep their skills sharp.

in my opinion, the key to artificial intelligence lies in merging separate computers, rather than a single computer.

@4L3X
lol, yea, and they could also play nazi zombies, and talk to people with mic's, and then watch the badass music visualizer...oh wait, that's only the 360, the ps3 network has nobody with mic's and the visualizer is lame as hell.
forgot about that.

Hey,

Isn't the Fed prosecuting some guy for moding a XBOX, if its OK for the Air Force, why does the public get punished for moding a machine.

Clearly this is using the device for something other than its original intent.

4L3X and yjakez are obvious trolls. Their statements have nothing to do with the hardware capability of the PS3. The cell processor is far superior than the XBox 360, and its parallel layout makes it ideal for the function that is stated in the article.

LOL

1) There are plenty of people with PS3 microphones playing games where it makes sense to have them on the PS3 network...

2) I am not deaf, therefore I listen to music instead of watching it's interpretation in a visualizer...

3) Since M$ raised the "Live" subscription fees... how much do you pay a month to play on their network?

Yeah... I pay $0 for the playstation network.

...but can it play Crysis on full graphic settings?

Seriously though, this is pretty awesome. Hopefully the new chips that use light instead of copper don't blow this out of the water too soon. But if it does, I'll buy one of the ps3s with my tax money you already get plz.

@eenos
The AF and all of DoD make proper requests to modify commercial products before doing so. I doubt the guy that modded his Xbox did the same.

Leave it to the Air Force.

USAF/DoD SHOULD be able to commandeer domestic game-stations, over the web, in times of war and national emergency ... like ... now.

If the police can commandeer your personal vehicle, in order to augment their capabilities, in a hot pursuit, then the DoD should be able to do the same (legally) with compute power.

If evey connected game-box was enlisted, at once, fpr "Crunching-at-Home", it COULD make the difference, either in RT decription, analysis, or target tracking in a mass-flurry situation.

Legalities aside ... Who cares if it is legal if failing to utilize this resource, at the critical moment, would result in a possible "total strategic loss" ??

'Spose I shouldn't of said that, in public ... hope they are doing it, tho.

I also believe it is very important that measures be taken, by SONY and DoD (and MS) and the makers of those proc chips to LIMIT or to PREVENT un-friendly militaries and competitors from using these "toys" in any sort of massively parallel array or cloud compute configuration.

Specifically, there should be a sw switch and some other region and domain checks to prevent massively parallel configs, without a certified authorization code, to be supplied by SONY and/or DoD/NATO authorities.

WE DO NOT want to make it too cheap or easy for foreign military powers to cobble a serious threat to our virtual battlespace or swarm-compute systems, without some serious and reliable checks and obstacles/barriers.

Agreed ??

I don't see ANY SPAM ?!

Is it Chinese New Year ?

THANK YOU !!

LMAO! @Buzz

I cant wait to see a similar one with strung together Xbox 360s, but very cool.

@ B.Z.

1.) I pay for a network that rarely lags. you play on a free system that lags, kicks you off and gets a bad reputation for using the phrase: "oh well its free."

I pay 4 bucks a month to play on a system that has servers fast enough to truly claim next generation gaming. I have BOTH systems and the PS3 I use only for BR Movies these days.

You are wrong.

@Buzz

USAF/DoD SHOULD be able to commandeer domestic game-stations, over the web, in times of war and national emergency ... like ... now.

Thank you! It will make my job so much easier when we have to commandeer YOUR property and move you to the new FEMA camps. Whatever we need as long as its an emergency eh? Awesome man thanks.

Maybe next they can use all the xbox 360s with the ring of death to build a bunker.

@ Caddy-Shack

Well, once a well stocked enemy missile force has blown their wad, and there are thousands of missiles and decoys and megatons of chaff and clutter, in the air, I really think my personal property becomes something of a secondary concern ... ....

... I mean ... It's really hard to play with your very own personal electronics, if there ain't no electricity !

... Might make a good pillow, tho. And I'll be sure to let FEMA know that you have no interest in any food or shelter or water or other goodies, they might have stored, for you and yours, in such such an (unlikely?) event.

And all those RAND think tanks are just ordinary academians ... experts hired (by us) to consider our safety and security ... I really do not think these experts are any sort of elitists ... They are paid to consider likely catastophies and to address those problems, for the public good.

Can they save us all ? Prolly not.

If I get a lethal dose of radiation, are they going to keep me hooped up on opiates, until I croak, and then incinerate my corpse, for health reasons? ... I guess that "I hope so".

Will they have a place for my kid, in the D.U.M.B.s ?

... If my kid has more to offer than the average mutt. Maybe.

Consiousness is actually very generic ... So is flesh.

If the green revolution (over-population via. petro-chem) cannot be sustained ... Well, I hope somebody has SOME sort of plan to save the best of everything and to ensure a healthy and diverse gene-pool.

Not pleasant thots. So sorry that you and I won't make it but, whomever does get "selected" will likely be fairly healthy and deserving. Somebody who, if you were to wake up and find out that you were "them", ... you would not be all that pissed.

Life's a beach and then we die. Deal.

I still feel a moddable version should be available for universities to use in number crunching situations.

Did you know the ps2 was banned from sale to some regions because it's hardware was suitable for a cruise missle guideance system? (with some heavy tweaking of course)

I hope they don't go to jail for putting linux on them. No wait, they just sentenced some kid in California for that.

This is exactly the reason i couldn't understand why IBM pulled the CELL chip, for super computers and similar tasks it is leagues ahead of anything else.

There is a huge amount of waste using PS3's not least the very expensive blu-ray drives and i'm not even sure if they are using the graphics chips for their simulations but guessing they are.

But the next generation CELL chips were looking awesome with a massive increase in speed and efficiency. 32-cores at 22nm were meant to be the specs.

I guess the only thing that we can say from this is that Sony will not be using the CELL chip in the PS4 and IBM can't make enough from servers and super computers to make it work.

Very sad indeed.

So Skynet will born on a bunch of linked PS3s? Oh the irony.

So how many people is that on multiplayer mode? LOL!

@eenos

they didnt mod these ps3s at all. the older models that they are using came with a feature that allowed for a Linux installation, it was an option that was in the settings on the XMB for years, they didnt have to mod or hack the system to allow this.

all the xbox fanboys are delusional if they think the xbox is better. they have hit the ceiling on what it can do and how many diffrent xbox's do they make? they have made too many models and paying for online? ms is just a money grabbing company they dont care about the people at least sony cares about its customers, my first xbox died but my ps3 is still going strong. anybody that says the xbox is better is a moron it plays games and dvd's wow what a system. just look at the games alot of ps3 games have twice the polygon count then xbox. plus 3d bluray? sony is the winner hands down

An Indian guy came up with this idea. He depicted the mass of black holes or something with 5 playstations. He should get the credit and air force should hire him for IT work

it wasn't a indian guy who came up with it theres a univeristy in the states who has a cluster of ps3 that they have had for years its only like 150 ps3's and they are using it to map the human genome and they use it for folding at home as well

I'm sure some 'doctor' will allow himself to be interfaced with it shortly.

First I heard of this was in 2007. A Kiwi hacker called tmasky.

Google "blackhat crackstation" for more.

It can go faster than that...

They can make it go to 750 trillion floating point operations per second, or more, if they jailbreak the PS3s to get access to the GPU. Now THAT would be cool: CPU + Cell processors + GPU.

Just do it! Google for psgroove ;-)

Actually, apart from the free press, Sony is likely not very happy about this. The Sony model envolves selling the PS3 at a loss, then compensating with the licencing free on the software. Thus, 1,760 items of loss with no subsequent software to recoup that loss? Unless the AF contracted directly with Sony for the units, and paid a real market cost value, then Sony got boned by this.

Note that the system war, as well, is meaningless, as each has its own benefits. The PS3 is a Blu-ray player (Sony gets a licencing fee for Blu-rays as well - and it was worth any loss on PS3's cost to win out over HD-DVD). The PS3 is a better processor - graphics, load time, speed, etc. The XBox, however, is cheaper to own, cheaper to buy software (games) for, and has a substantially larger library of choices. For the two years it has seemed that XBox was the greater value now, while the PS3 would be the greater value later on.

Where someone falls on that spectrum usually has more to do with pride, ego, personal preference of use, and where one threw their money than actual compairison.

I think it's pretty funny (sad) how most people on here have nothing better to do with their lives than post a torrent of comments justifying why xbox is better than ps3, and vice versa. They're video game consoles... get over it...

As for the article - Pretty amazing the things we are capable of doing with some hardware anyone can purchase for their homes.

I actually think that supercomputers will be the new nuke in a cyber arms race, isnt that KOOL!? pop quiz, whats the most dangerous thing to every man woman and child in the first world? The disappearence of... telecom's, internet, and protected computer databases :D But its OK, im sure theres a spray on stem-cell healing puke for just such an occasion! :D

Homeland Security, protecting the people with pukes! :3

sounds like the AF contracted with sony, no other way of doing it, software and ability to configure it would have been part of the contract, plus many of these systems cannot be owned in places like Iran and North Korea for the sole purpose that it may be used to enhance missile tech, check international export laws, I think I saw an article where they were saying one current generation gaming platform had more computing power than any top of the line NK missile, go bless america and our need for gaming lol

@ Buzz: Don't trip on caddilac's crap. If he was such an intelligent or informed person he'd likely know that with the enactment of the War Powers Act, permission to commandeer has already been given. And if he were just a smidge more than that of either one, he'd know that with the passage of the "Patriot" Act; our government can commandeer any resource they need to answer a threat even without War Powers being in effect.

Were these PS3s manufactured in Japan or China?

Don't these Air Force people know that the Chinese government have secret backdoors hardwired into every chip made in China?

GO AIR FORCE!!!

The Air Force knows how to handle this, don't worry about Chinese computer chips, the USAF knows what they're doing.

Hmmmm ....

We all know that these boxes are purpose designed to simulate a shared battlespace. ... So, just as the DoD is using a Google Earth type engine, to model global-tomagraphic sensor fusion, it seems a "no-brainer" that the various branches of service, as well as the Joint Cheifs central C2, should all be using these platforms, as the very basis, of both cloud hosting and distributed client (soldier node) functions. ... duh.

And ... I see the distributed client "product" as being tablet based with a touch-screen, on one side and a solar panel, on the other side ... And a fat rubber bezel (like a Timex G-Shock) ... It would also have GPS with inertial continuity and be able to run all iPhone apps (even if addt'l hw is req'd)

Rotsa Ruck !

Just Lovin' this "no-mo-spam" thing!

( Ahhh ... It feels SO good, when it stops ! )

And, so ... it would also have a KINDLE CLIENT app, so soldiers can carry a slew of PDF files, like a Chilton's Manual for the Flying Hummer and other "field docs" .

I know that the iPhone is "already there" and "doing much of that" but a larger screen ... eInk + solar ... and ... Well let's just take the next-gen HD mega-pix video iPhone and make it the size of an iPad and integrate it with an X-Box (or PS3) ... Crappola! ...

... When these things start doing full MRI scans and auto-defrib, James Tiberius Kirk won't have ANYthing on us !

An L-STAT, in your pocket ... THAT *would* be a great app !

Just think when the PS4 comes out they will
be able to do this with half the amount
they are useing now.

@BuzzLightYear

New PS3's cant run linux and old PS3's were more or less forced to upgrade to a new OS that doesnt allow linux or going back. so they have taken steps to disable one of the coolest things about the PS3. i always suspected that they did they at the request of the government to limit others from using the PS3 as a supercomputer. i dont understand why nobody else makes workstations with the Cell processor..... maybe the same reason? naw....
scrogbot

First of all 2 million dollars were spent, I find that way over priced. Even if they bought the ps3 when they first came out which i doubt it would add up to a million, not factoring taxes which they don't have to pay? but this means 1 million was distributed among a few ppl which all they did was hook up 1760 ps3 together which probably took a month and in the end they paid some poor idiot a few thousands.. maybe i shouldn't care so much . i wonder what happened to the controllers. ???

I don't think they were the only ones to do this, but researchers at the University of Illinois started doing this (albeit on a smaller scale) with PS2s as early as 2003.

The really intriguing part is that it all started with Sony releasing a Linux kit late in the lifecycle of the PS2. They've done just the opposite with the PS3, removing the Linux functionality late in the lifecycle of the system, perhaps in recognition of the fact that people were taking advantage of the hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D needed to make an incredibly fast, efficient, and cheap computing platform.

Still, if the applications that private programmers/engineers have developed for the Kinect in such a short time are any indication, some of the greatest innovations (for both beneficial AND destructive ends) will come from independent researchers.

Think about this, there are millions of PS3's in homes all over the world, all hooked to broadband (or most of them anyway.) I wonder what is being done with THAT super computer?

"Yeah... I pay $0 for the playstation network." And you get to play against all the bad PS3 kids... that has got to be an added bonus.

that is beast. glad they didn't use xbox right?

Just proves that PS3's own the XBOX 360's

O.K.
Now after reading all these tech geek comments I think you people missed the biggest question this article brings to mind.
How much did the DoD PAY for the play stations? It's a
multimillion dollar system. We've all heard stories about DoD paying way to much even for a hammer

Jeeeeeeez BUZZ!

You watch Dr Strangelove on a continuous loop huh?

youre talking eugenics now?

In some sick way I agree with you but im not as hopped up on thermite so my inhibition unit wont let me admit it on this post.

Hey BuzzLightYear, I just registered an account to say that you are a complete nutjob. Just wow. I mean, you're a nutjob compared even to your average internet nutjob.

I LOVE SONY! Now I have another reason to buy me a PS3! I have a PS1 and a PS2 now I'm upgrading.

But can it find me a cheap hotel room?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 55 non spam and 1 spam why the C-C-C-COMBO-BREAKER!?????

Have you missed the meaning of this entirely? The Air Force Research Laboratory has demonstrated that a very powerful and practical computer can be built for a fraction of the cost that the DOD and other federal agencies would spend. There is a reason for that. This project was not politically influenced.

Our Congress as well as many of the top brass in the Pentagon get special favors from powerful companies in exchange for their influence over these projects. Much of what the government contracts for is grossly overpriced. Just the cost of soliciting bids is horrendous. Legally, the lowest bidder that can fulfill the contract wins. So, the specifications for procurement, from the description to the testing requirements, are often given unnecessary and complicated details that only the intended vendor can fill, at two to three times the price.

So, the expensive source gets the contract, the influential people in the government get their kickbacks and the taxpayer gets screwed. Your tax dollars at work.

Wow, think about how many games you could play on this supercomputer!

This old news I read about them airforce buying these last year.
computerworld.com/s/article/345642/Air_Force_Taps_PlayStation_3_for_Research

Then again after an update that got rid Linux,

arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/05/how-removing-ps3-linux-hurts-the-air-force.ars

Not surprising, and I applaud them for using resources other than traditional supercomputer kits.

I read the PS3 contains 6 CPUs used in the makings of a supercomputer, as well as containing a fairly nice graphics card. Not sure what the latter is used for, though. Doesn't the data have to be translated into a format that the GPU understands, because it's hardware accelerated and therefore only processes data in pre-configured processes?

Sounds cool.

How can they actually totally remove a computer board from the ability to run Linux when it is so much closer to the Unix Posix base code? Can't the boards just have the BIOS chips pulled and register rename?