US Military PS3 Based Supercomputer In the Works?

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Remember all that nonsense that terrorists could build a cruise missile with a Playstation 2? Well, that was bunk, but, the real life United States Air Force has an interest in PlayStation 3s, and it’s not for gaming. The air-division of the US military wants the Sony gaming consoles for it’s cell processor, as it hopes to build a supercomputing cluster for research purposes.

The USAF already owns 336 PS3, clustered together for supercomputer research, but after their research program was awarded $2 million by the US Department of Defense, they placed an order for another 2,200, to add to their cluster of super computers. This isn’t as far fetched as it might sound, as the Cell processor featured inside the PS3 is the same featured inside the IBM Roadrunner, the world’s second fastest super computer. (Albeit, the PS3 features eight Cell processors, the Roadrunner features just a bit more at over 12,000). The Cell processor came about after a joint-venture between Sony, IBM and Toshiba.

Blog Sony Insider reports that the Air Force’s choice is more cost effective, as a comparable custom-built supercomputer solution could of cost the Air Force 13 times and considerable more engineering time than their solution of buying over 2,000 PlayStation 3s (and the supercomputers probably don’t play Blu-Ray movies, either). The Air Force specifically named the Intel Xeon-based supercomputers as being too slow and too expensive for their needs.

The needs of the cluster will primarily be research, but possible future Air Force applications include video processing, radar enhancement and investigations into ‘neuromorphic’ (or human thought-like) computing. Another goal of the PlayStation 3′s cluster research is to see if the Cell processor can be used in other military applications.