Condor PS3 Supercomputer Goes Online for Air Force: Shall We Play a Game?
March 26th, 2011
There’s a reason why video game consoles like the Sony PS3 are restricted to some countries. It’s because if you have enough of them, you can build your own supercomputer. The Condor Project is a supercomputer made out of 1,716 PS3 networked together for the US Air Force. I wonder what the Xbox 360 has to say about this.
Apparently, if you use PS3s, you can save up to 10× the cost of commercial supercomputer technology. Condor was created for the Air Force for its image processing tasks. It’s considered one of the top forty fastest computers in the world, despite its video game brains. The Condor is supposed to help process all of the Air Force’s recent aerial photos. Snapping up the photos via satellites isn’t a problem. It’s finding something useful in them.
Users will be able to use Condor to move cameras around, kind of like if you’re playing Starcraft. Apparently, users can rewind or predict forward based upon the information gathered. I don’t know exactly what they mean about predicting the future, but it probably has to do with some image interpolation based upon the available info.
[Hot Hardware via CrunchGear]
Comments (8):
Post a Comment:
Categories: Computing Digital Imaging Strange + Wonderful Technology
Tags: air force condor image processing ps3 supercomputer usa
Air Force is using on the PS3 to achieve this functionality. I wonder what will happen, when one of the PS3 breaks and they get it back from Sony repaired but with no possibility to install Linux on it.
You dont need to send a PS3 back to sony to fix it. http://www.techiedoctors.com fixed mine and didnt have to remove any data off it and when I got it back it still had the same firmware on it.
jailbrreak
nice Idea. But they will need guarantee for the hardware. It does not work like this for them.
I smell another suing from Sony …
Hopfuly you don’t get hacked lol
Such a great idea! The predicting the future aspect is interesting, have they released any figures on what they expect the accuracy of the ‘future predictions’ to be? I’d guess pretty low beyond a few seconds!
I’m doing a ‘home-build’ of this project. I’m blogging my way though and everything will be posted so you get the full story. Check out the blog at: http://ps3clusterproject.weebly.com/blog.html
Thanks for the update Joel.
While I would have to agree Sony is not a customer service oriented company at all they used to build their products to fail shortly after the warranties were expired. It would be nice to seem them put the cell technology to use in blade servers or at least license out the technology so that others can use it. In many ways they are similar to Apple in how they view customers as criminals first.