Remember that note about the United States Air Force purchasing a lot of PS3? Well they're setting and ready to simulate ... the brain.
The supercomputer -- snappily monikered "500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster" -- will be put to work playing 2,000 simultaneous games of God of War III. Wait, no. Among other things, they'll be attempting to simulate the way the human brain processes information and how it pulls off the remarkably difficult task of recognizing the content of images.
"Humans can routinely do these things, but a computer struggles to do it," the facility's computing director Mark Barnell told Stars and Stripes. "In a general sense, we are interested in making it autonomous."
The cluster won't be as powerful as a regular supercomputing rig, but it will be cheaper and more environmentally friendly: it'll consume as much as 95% less electrical power and shut down unused machines when the cluster isn't running at full capacity.
http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/u-s-air-force-building-supercomputer-from-ps3s/1387199
Wow .... Why they didn't get a human being? They can get them cheaper these days and are more enviromentally friendly.
