Tuesday, February 2, 2010

PlayStations power Air Force 'supercomputer' -- Defense Systems

PlayStations power Air Force 'supercomputer' -- Defense Systems: "The Air Force Research Laboratory has built a supercomputer driven by several hundred Sony PlayStation 3 consoles, reports Warren Peace in Stars and Stripes.
AFRL has assembled 336 PlayStation 3s in a cluster and, together with off-the-shelf graphic processing units, created a supercomputer nearly 100,000 times faster than high-end computer processors currently on the market.
It's not the first time the gaming console has been harnessed for more serious uses. The University of Massachusets Dartmouth, for example, in 2007 built a powerful computer out of eight PlayStations to study black holes."