Obviously clusters are "cheaper" but this is the US Military (Air Force to be exact).  They should be more worried about performance which would be much higher had they just purchased the Cell processors and built their own supercomputer structure.

Guess they are on tight budget than?

For the government funded military, that would be very shocking.

yup..the PS3 is pretty good at some simulation work and its very cheap than the alternative. and yes IBM will still be using core Cell processor component's, will it be a New Cell processor, umm no will it be LIKE THE Cell processor you bet. the big thing is Cell processor code would still be able to be used, If the design team wanted to use ISA function's in the new Processor. this is a good example of like the x86 processor market.

there is many x86 type's of chip's but they all share the common core ISA

the Same is happening with this part of the HPC market, new processor's from IBM will share the common core of the Cell processor because IBM knows it work's and works very well.

They will continue to partially use cell. I'm not talking about this article based of another article of another article but the original interview which is now days old. He says that they'll continue to use cell in ways in their future processors. Integrated within the new system that'll be called something else.

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

yea, the very fact that IBM know the Cell processor works , they are adding to other processor's in their line's to gather the extra functionality that the Cell processor offer's. which is mainly acceleration, the Cell processor is a beast at process acceleration. 

Toshiba uses the Cell to add a quite sizable acceleration to video 3d, video game's, encoding etc. the spur's chip is very good at that, so implementation of said Cell technology already work's very well so including the core technology into new processor's is all but assured.

why waste the investment. The Cell work's, so why would IBM not use the technology.

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.

lol..what was funny it only too 200 ps3's clustered to break the MD5's world wide web encryption

Using PS3's To Forge Site Certificates
Verisign discontinues flawed MD5 certificates
(old news - 09:02AM Friday Jan 02 2009)
tags: security · software · networking
Tipped by KeysCapt

User KeysCapt writes in: "Researchers using 200 PlayStation 3's, a sophisticated attack on the ailing MD5 hash algorithm, and a slip-up by Verisign claim to have found a method of hacking any website, in the interest of improving web security. As a result Verisign says it's stopped using MD5, as of around noon Pacific time December 30. "We're disappointed that these researchers did not share their results with us earlier," writes Verisign's Tim Callan, "but we're happy to report that we have completely mitigated this attack."

Yup. they r going to have a tournament, 8 teams, 3 round , 1 cup. :P