This is the ps3 supercomputer created by the US air force's research lab in 2010. You're probably wondering why this existed and why you'd use play station 3's to build a supercomputer. In this video we're going to cover those both of those questions.

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So lets have a look at one ps3 super computer itself and then we'll look at what it was used for and why the choose to use ps3's to build it.
This ps3 supercomputer was the largest built and was known as the condor cluster. It was made of 1760 PlayStation 3 consoles all linked together and working together, this photo just shows part of the supercomputer. The computer used an incredible 5 miles of cable to connect the ps3's together and was located in New York.
So what was it used for?

The condor cluster was used for mainly for satellite imagery processing, its processing power allowed it to analyse high resolution images from satellites at over a billion pixels per minute, greatly reducing the amount of time need to analyse satellite data for things such as monitoring the weather and creating climate change models. It was also used for ai research that needed far more processing power than the average pc can provide.

So why did they use ps3's to build this supercomputer rather than just use regular pc parts or servers.

One of the main reasons is that the ps3 featured a ground breaking cell cpu, this was a regular dual core cpu alongside an incredible 8 co processors. This was an extremely unusual design and made it incredibly hard to develop games for the console as they'd need to write code for a specific core and rewrite it for another in some cases. This did however mean it gave the console and incredible amount of processing power which is one of the reasons the ps3 was used for supercomputers, infact a ps3 cell processor running fully optimised code could probably stand u to dome desktop cpu's today, it really was ahead of its time. The original ps3 also known as the fat ps3 was also capable of running linux which makes it easy to connect the consoles to each other and run bespoke applications. The final reason the ps3 was used to build a super computer was cost. The ps3's needed for the project cost around $400 dollars at the time of building giving them an approximate total of 704.000 dollars for the total amount of ps3's. To get the same performance from servers or regular pc parts would've cost in the 10's of millions, the power consumption of the condor cluster was around 10% of that of supercomputers with similar processing power.

As technology moved forward the ps3 supercomputers began to become less useful compared to modern ones. With the launch of the ps3 silm and super silm sony removed the ability to run linux on them effectivity making the newer machine useless to those looking to build a super computer from them. Do you think we'll see a playstation super computer again in the future?

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#playstation #ps3 #supercomputer #condorcluster

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