We’ve routinely joked in the past about “playstation® Climatology”, a phrase coined by JunkScience.com a few years back in response to the constant barrage of model output from supercomputers worldwide that forecast doom and gloom ahead for the human condition if we don’t repent and stop our use of fire.
Well now, the Air Force’s Research Lab in Rome, NY actually went and made a PS3 based supercomputer.
The Air Force’s Research Lab in Rome, NY. has one of the cheapest supercomputers ever made, and best of all over 3,000 of your friends can play Tekken on it. The computer is made from 1,716 PlayStation 3s linked together, and is used to process images from spy planes. From the article: “The Air Force calls the souped-up PlayStations the Condor Supercomputer and says it is among the 40 fastest computers in the world. The Condor went online late last year, and it will likely change the way the Air Force and the Air National Guard watch things on the ground.
Here’s the systems before they were wired up:
Here’s what the Air Force says about the computing power:
53 TERAFLOPS Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Cluster: This cluster
enabled early access to IBM’s CBE® chip technology included
in the low priced commodity PS3 gaming consoles. This is a
heterogeneous cluster with powerful sub-cluster head nodes. The
cluster is comprised of 14 sub-clusters, each with 24 PS3s, and
one server containing dual quad-core Xeon chips.
Full writeup here
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“Condor”, huh?
Sure hope it runs longer than 3 days…
Must be for applications that do not require much inter-processor communications. That is limited by light speed so cable length and synchronization issues are critical.
Still, it is probably great for image processing.
Wow! Interesting. 51 years ago this month I walked into the control room of the largest combined computer systems in the world at the time (we were told). Dual computers of 50,000 vacuum tubes each, one on each side of the room, that were always talking to each other as one part of the US Air Force’s SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Air Defense system. THAT was the start of a wonderful career, but not in the AF. Together they maybe had 1 megaflop. 🙂 But they did the job. Go Air Force!
^ Milwaukee Bob @ur momisugly 1618
Forty years ago, I recall walking into the SAGE building (as a wide-eyed kid) at the USAF base in Duluth, MN at which my father was a computer maintenance technician. One literally walked into the beast. To my young imagination it was like being on board the star-ship Enterprise.
Have often wondered why Christopher Monckton so often mentions X-Box-360s when referring to the computer models.
While I thought he was just being post ironic , perhaps there’s more to it than we realised.
The military mum on Wife Swap should be shown this article. She argued against here temporary son about playing video games saying they had no benefits. Obvioulsy they do.
Poor Yorek says:
March 24, 2011 at 5:01 pm
I was close, Truax AFB Madison WI
One literally walked into the beast.
Very true! The core memory unit was 4k and stood 6′ tall and about 3’x3′ square. You could look inside it and see the magnetic doughnuts “hanging” on the x, y & z wires.
and those massive control consoles were used years later in various movies…
I remember this from a couple of years ago and at the time, it was said, that more and more supercomputers would be built this way. Hopefully it’s relevant.
Here’s a blurb from IBM at: http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/
The Cell Architecture grew from a challenge posed by Sony and Toshiba to provide power-efficient and cost-effective high-performance processing for a wide range of applications, including the most demanding consumer appliance: game consoles. Cell – also known as the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) – is an innovative solution whose design was based on the analysis of a broad range of workloads in areas such as cryptography, graphics transform and lighting, physics, fast-Fourier transforms (FFT), matrix operations, and scientific workloads. As an example of innovation that ensures the clients’ success, a team from IBM Research joined forces with teams from IBM Systems Technology Group, Sony and Toshiba, to lead the development of a novel architecture that represents a breakthrough in performance for consumer applications. IBM Research participated throughout the entire development of the architecture, its implementation and its software enablement, ensuring the timely and efficient application of novel ideas and technology into a product that solves real challenges.
wws says:
March 23, 2011 at 8:30 pm
🙂
The big screen at the front is where the demonic face appears.
Imagine that?!
So, while my kids and grand-kids aren’t online (late in the middle of the night), millions of these things could easily be chained together via their already in place internet connections, and be used to solve any number of very important computational tasks, near instantly? That’s an awesome thought!
On the other hand, if my kids and grand kids had ever used cheap bungee cords to secure their fairly expensive (in relative terms) devices, as the AF appears to have done here, I would ground them for a week! And the thought of grounding the USAF, even for one minute, is irony indeed ;-]
Oh, great!
Now Playstations, Nintendos, XBoxes, personal computers, and more will be added to EAR/ITAR lists of the bureaucracy.
They even have food mixing equipment and cordless phones listed (since cordless phones use spread spectrum technology, the basic versions of which were invented by Hedy Lamar three-quarters of a century ago).
ITAR = International Traffic in Arms rules, EAR is exports restricted for security reasons.
No substitute for stopping evil at its source, instead of trying to run a Bar Lev Line.
(The Bar Lev Line was Israel’s successful attempt to prove the old adage about not learning from history. In one of the official wars against Israel the Egyptian Army got around the Bar Lev Line faster than Germany got around France’s Maginot Line in WWII.)
What is your GFlop per unit cost when cost is zero?
http://www.extremelinux.info/stonesoup/
Ah, the “good old days” of Beowulf clusters… I made one “just for fun” with 6 or 8 nodes (it varied). At present, I’ve still got 2 of them (one running GIStemp… I ‘played up’ that it was on an old 400 Mhz AMD chip box, but in fact I’d done the port to one node of my 8 node Beowulf thinking if I needed extra “umph” I just add nodes, and never needed more than one. It being pretty stupid code…)
Oh, and the AF is using the Mark I “Bread Rack”… I’ve used them before too…
http://beowulf.org/
Oh, and the old Cray ran C just fine. We installed the “first ever” release of UNICOS, the UNIX OS on a Cray, at Apple in about ’86 IIRC. Ran C just fine. It would vectorize OK, but not nearly as well as the FORTRAN (something about staff-centuries of opitmizing in the FORTRAN compiler…). It was “helpful” to have a loop counter of “64” (called a “stride”) as then your problem got broken into bits that exactly filled the vector units… So you would put a “for I = 1 to 64” loop in the middle of things if possible and an outer loop to do it as many times as needed, then the stuff inside the loop (like “A=B*C” ) would get done in the vector units in groups of 64 per instruction cycle.
Sometimes I miss my old Cray… Had a 2 TB STK “Tape Robot” on it that you could open a door and go inside… about $42 Million all told, CPU & Robot IIRC.
At any rate, as I can now buy a 2 TB (and much faster) disk for about $100 and a faster computer for about $400, I don’t miss it THAT much 😉
Had a 750 kVA power feed and about a 16 x 16 foot “water tower” with a 4 inch chilled water line for cooling … power bill was more than my house cost… hmmm… maybe I don’t miss it …
This is the ultimate irony in view of the criticism of the “playstation” mentality of pilots killing people with drones on the other side of the world.
Please, credit where credit is due; she had help:
Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Frequency-hopping_spread-spectrum_invention
Sidenote: I’ve not reviewed the merits of the awarded patent to see if the ‘claims’ of SS technology are true, and if principles and concepts thought of then are actually used today …
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Ah, an “ARM architecture processor” per: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Tegra
(ex-TI GaAs Facility (now TriQuint owned I think) alum here …)
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Wait until they start ‘trading securities and commodities‘ – oh wait, they already are:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/visualizing-todays-hft-market-stick-save?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zerohedge%2Ffeed+%28zero+hedge+-+on+a+long+enough+timeline%2C+the+survival+rate+for+everyone+drops+to+zero%29
HFT or High Frequency Trading – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
No more open outcry pit trading, with ‘trading floors’ having been replaced by electronic trading systems Globex – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globex
Open outcry – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_outcry
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Perhaps overshadowing the accomplishments of Hedy Lamarr and her associate (or vice versa) were the developers of the SIGSALY (also known as Green Hornet) secure speech system used in World War II for the highest-level Allied communications:
SIGSALY/Wiki – WW2 secure speech system
Sigsaly/NSA – Sigsaly Story
Sigsaly/NSA – The Start of the Digital Revolution
Notable is the use of ‘noise values’ as the encryption key stored on a phonograph record. The record would be duplicated, with records (1 each) being distributed to SIGSALY systems on both ends of a conversation … _this_ is used in DSSS (Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum) systems (of which Qualcomm CDMA and CDMA-derived cellular systems) and would represent the Walsh ‘pseudo-random’ noise sequence used today to ‘spread’ a direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) signals to/from subscriber and base-station transceivers.
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With all this reminiscing, I feel like everyone should be using taglines at the end of their posts…
Bruce
– Never be fooled by a kiss, or let a fool kiss you