US Air Force researchers have created the Defense DepartmentÂ’s largest interactive supercomputer, the 35th fastest in the world, from 1,760 Song PlayStation 3s.
The amalgamation of consoles, nicknamed the “Condor Cluster,” will be used to process high-resolution satellite images and boost surveillance capabilities. It will allow scientists to monitor a 15.5 square mile area in real time.
The director of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio said that the computer is also capable of reading 20 pages per second with up to 30 percent of the characters removed and recovering all the words without error.
The Condor Cluster is energy efficient and at $2 million, has a price tag well below that of traditional computing equipment. It can achieve about 1.5 GigaFLOPS, floating point operations per second, the unit by which supercomputing power is measured, per watt of computing power, about fifteen times more powerful than a typical supercomputer. |