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New US military computer made from nearly 2,000 PlayStation consoles
The United States Air Force has transformed almost 2,000 Japanese Sony PlayStation consoles into a powerful supercomputer suitable for military tasks.
The new device will handle tasks including artificial intelligence research Photo: GETTY
By Danielle Demetriou in Tokyo 6:30AM GMT 14 Dec 2010
The new computer, which has been named the Condor, was created from the gaming devices at the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in New York State in a bid to create a cost effective and green alternative to conventional technology.
The Condor consists of a cluster of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 processors fused with high-end technology to create a device which is 50,000 times faster than the average consumer laptop.
Believed to be the 34th most powerful supercomputer in the world, the device will handle tasks including artificial intelligence research, pattern recognition detection and the analysis of heavy quantities of images from surveillance systems.
As well as being cheaper than any equivalent device required to conduct the same tasks, the Condor also consumes less than a tenth of the power of comparable supercomputers, according to Mark Barnell, director of AFRL's High Power Computing.
"The total cost of the Condor system was approximately $2 million, which is a cost savings of between 10 and 20 times for the equivalent capability," he said.
Describing the speed at which it will be able to analyse and process information, he added: "Such capability exceeds any other interactive supercomputer currently used by the Department of Defence." The new supercomputer is the result of an initiative by the military laboratory to explore the potential uses of inexpensive commercial software.
Key to the attraction of using PlayStation video game consoles – more commonly found in teenagers' bedrooms than military laboratories - is the presence of the Cell BE chip, innovative technology which can greatly accelerate multimedia applications.
