The Air Force plays Call of Duty on the most powerful game console in existence.

The United States Air Force Research Laboratory has completed what it calls the Condor Cluster, a supercomputer made entirely of PlayStation 3 consoles. The Condor Cluster, housed in Rome, New York, reportedly has capabilities heads and tails above every other interactive computer in the Department of Defense.

Made of 1,760 PlayStation 3 processors and 168 general purpose processors, the Condor Cluster provides extreme power for its relatively low cost. It has the ability to calculate 500 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS), but was made for $2 million thanks to the cost of the PS3. Mark Barnell, director of the Air Force Research Laboratory's High Power Computing division, says this is "a cost savings of between 10 and 20 times for the equivalent capability." It also uses 1/10 the power of a comparable supercomputer, apparently making it "green."

The Condor Cluster is not the fastest supercomputer in town, with the big boys currently able to compute a couple of quadrillion FLOPS, but it'll still be useful to the military. The entire Department of Defense will have access to the Condor Cluster on a shared basis, and it is predicted to be used for "neuromorphic artificial intelligence research, synthetic aperture radar enhancement, image enhancement and pattern recognition research." These are likely codewords for "so the U.S. government can look through your window more easily."

The Air Force will cut the ribbon on the Condor Cluster today, December 1, 2010, making it open for computational business. The Condor Cluster might be a modern marvel of cheap supercomputing technology, but the Air Force wastroubled by Sony's choice to remove the option to install Linux in a firmware update, making it harder to find replacement systems should a console break. If you've got an unboxed PS3 "Phat" laying around, keep the old firmware on that puppy and the U.S. military might make you an offer someday.

Source

PS3 is undertracked by 1,760 units confirmed.

VGChartz is teh bias.

Shit. People think the LHC is scary, but imagine what that many PS3s could do if only they had games.

I wonder what's written in that black part...

Oh, nothing. I was just wondering aloud how they expect to win a real war with something that can't even win a console war.

Console wars>>>real wars.

It Only Loses Every War.

And all it takes is one bored soldeir to put in a game, and update the firmware....

PS3s are bigger than your crappy gaming PC.

@ badgenome

not much love for playstation?  In terms of Console Wars the seventh gen is the first war since the the 4th gen really,as thanks to Sony the 5th and 6th were more of a genocide with PS and PS2 leading the way.One bad gen and you count Sony's days down,but Nintendo had two bad gens and are now effectively kicking the shit out of their competitors.

And the PS3 has a superb range of games I find ^_^