PS3 supercomputer makes geeks jealous

What damage could the Chinese do with 1,716 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles? How many leaks could Wikileaks hold if they were running nearly 2,000 of the world’s greatest gaming systems? Well, if they were the Air Force, the answer would be none.

The Air Force is going to use their Sony Playstation super computer for solving things like world hunger, Black Ops, and some mean Zelda.

The actual idea of linking together thousands of computers in order to use their combined power is not new (SETI) but the idea of using the Sony Playstations… well, that’s not new either, but connecting hundreds and thousands of the game console together with programming to utilize them is something quite impressive.

It will be a while until Microsoft finds any government agency willing to buy a thousand XBox’s but with Microsoft being so rich and powerful, maybe they can give the Air Force a discount.

Mark Barnell heads up the high-performance computing project, said the following, “This particular system is about half a petaflop, or capable of about 500 trillion calculations per second,” he said. “In the current time that we can measure it, it’s about the 35th- or 36th-fastest computer in the world, and with some things that are going to be changing in the next eight or nine months with some upgrades, we could boost it to maybe the 20th-fastest computer in the world, and at the same time make it, at that moment in time, the greenest computer.”

A super computer that can handle that many operations, that quickly, means that there will be a Trojan soon infecting a gaming console and eventually turning its mighty power to find Nemo and Wally.

Source: Air Force