US Air Force to Buy 2200 PS3's to conduct SUPER Computer Research!!

[joeorc]

darthdevidem01 said:

nightsurge said:

Why don't they save themselves the money and just build servers with multiple Cell BE's rather than wasting it on buying actual PS3's then losing performance by clustering?

@Staude:  Maybe you should have read closer.  They ARE discontinuing Cell development.  They ARE NOT re-using the Cell in future projects, they are re-using ASPECTS of the Cell.  Things they learned from using the Cell architecture will carry over but the new products will NOT be Cell variants or Cell successors nor will they have Cells in them.

Its much cheaper I think......the PS3 isn't cheap, but doing what you are suggesting may require research, R&D and so on

yes it is very much so. the Cell processor in the PS3 is very good for the low cost price to make a HPC cluster for certain scientific or other simulation's. The price is one of the big +'s for indeed using the PS3's.

the PS3 is not only cheap when it come's to HPC cluster's but also get's good result's without the high cost of other HPC's

the big selling point is lots of computing power with low cost.

now of course this does not apply to every situation, but for some broad use in areas, like sonar,weather, graphic's acceleration, media broadcast networks. etc it's pretty d@mn hard to beat the cost/computing power that the PS3 offer's clustered in those example field's i just gave.