Air Force builds huge supercomputer by linking 1,760 PlayStation 3s

By Itsuo Inouye, AP

Air Force researchers have created the defense department's largest interactive supercomputer by linking 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3s, the Air Force Times reports.

Moreover, says the director of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, the linkup forms the 35th fastest computer in the world.

Research director Mark Barnell says the lab spent about $2 million, or about one tenth the cost of using traditional computer equipment, to build the "Condor Cluster."

"We're striving hard to make affordable and constrained systems, where they can really use them and make a difference," he told reporters earlier this month.

The new Condor Cluster will be used to process high-resolution satellite images and boost surveillance capabilities, the Times reports.

The supercomputer can achieve about 1.5 GigaFLOPS per watt of computing power. FLOPS, or floating point operations per second, is the unit by which supercomputing power is measured.

A typical supercomputer can reach only about one-15th of that, the Times says.