Air Force Building Supercomputer From PlayStation Terminals

(Jan. 28) -- For millions of teenagers, PlayStation 3 may be just a toy, but the U.S. military is using hundreds of the game consoles to build a system that can rival some of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

Air Force researchers already have more than 300 game consoles linked together and are adding more than a thousand more to build a supercomputer that, when complete, should have 500 teraflops of performance, about the same as the latest generation of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer.

"The brains behind the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., are clustering the consoles, along with some off-the-shelf graphic processing units, to create a supercomputer nearly 100,000 times faster than high-end computer processors sold today," Stars & Stripes reported Thursday.

Video game consoles at Air Force computer lab

United States Air Force

Scientists already have more than 300 game consoles linked together at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y.

Last year, the Air Force announced it was buying 1,700 PlayStation 3 games consoles as part of its homemade supercomputer project. What makes the PlayStation 3 attractive is the relatively inexpensive cost of the system in relation to its processing power.

The Air Force researchers are by no means the first ones to build an off-the-shelf supercomputer. Guarav Khanna, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said he built a supercomputer using eight PlayStation 3 consoles at a cost of just $4,000. Khanna and others then published an open-source guide on how to do it.

For academic researchers, building supercomputers from commercial parts, like a PlayStation 3, potentially allows access to what is otherwise a costly system. In the case of the Air Force, increasing processing power could allow computers to perform high-level functions, such as target recognition, similar to the way the human brain works.

Supercomputers have also played a key role in maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal by allowing scientists to perform complex simulations.