call me crazy, but it kind of says what the Air Force wants them for in the article. and it isn't for target practise, whatever that is.

I always thought the Cell would suck for double precision numbers. it has 250Gflops single precision and I thought always just 14 Gflops double precision. So I thought the airforce would use it for some purpose where they just need single precision. But infact the Cell has 80 GFLOPS DOUBLE precision. Which is pretty fast. The 14 Gflops were just because the benchmarks could just measure the PPE and not the 7 SPUs. So the Cell is even more powerful then I thought and you can use it really as a Super Computer for all purposes.

The military and scientific researchers need the PS3 to run Linux, though, to program their shit on them.

Sony should release the PS3 Research and Destruction SKU, a slimline with Linux, at $499.  Researchers would still buy, and Sony would make a profit.

@LHWB

thats really a great Idea. I wonder why Sony dont make this reality. because the Ps3 is really the first console which can be used for this.

Although Saddam Hussein had a scheme to import like 1000 PS2s back in the day to make a ...kind of fast...computer.  We were all over it though, after giving him chemical weapons under the Reagan admin suddenly we were having second thoughts about allowing him to buy game consoles.

yes this is old news....

http://kotaku.com/363837/us-air-force-wants-to-buy-300-ps3s-for-cell-assessment

look at the date.   March 4th 2008.   This "new news" is pretty much saying they bought....more.   

They built a supercomputer using PS3s. Now they're ordering a lot more to upgrade it, which kind of implies it was a successful project and worth taking further. That is news. I had assumed this sort of thing would be an interesting exercise, but they'd probably end up with multi-CPU x86 Linux boxes in clusters as the better idea.

And I said that ofcoure in the past we saw such projects but THIS is new. 2200 NEW PS3 bought. just because the airforce did this before it dont make it old news. Infact the news gained a new quality. because that means that the Airforce is satisfied with the PS3s They tested them and the PS3s worked very good so they bought even more. Thats new news. 

lets take this example to clarify the situation. If barcelona would have won/lost against real madrid 2:1 recently would this be old news because in the past happened the same ?

Should have read what asc99c wrote because he basically said the same I did.

Very Cool

I would like to think that the most advance air force in the world would know what they are doing.

Not that I don't respect your opinion but surely they must have some bigger brains than yours thinking this through before they came to this conclusion.

Then again you might be more intelligent than the air force brains put together. Then again you are posting on this forum.