Air force building supercomputer out of PS3s

[Juche]

This is cool.

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/u-s-air-force-building-supercomputer-from-ps3s/1387199

No doubt the Air Force purchasing department gets some odd requests from time to time, but we'd love to have seen the grin on the face of the officer tasked with procuring some 1,700 Playstation 3s for a USAF facility in Rome, NY.

Before you complain about your tax dollars being spent on toys, the machines aren't for gaming. Instead, the facility -- an Air Force research lab -- will join them into a parallel-computing cluster that, when complete, will number well over 2,000 PS3s.

The supercomputer -- snappily monikered "500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster" -- will be put to work playing 2,000 simultaneous games of God of War III. Wait, no. Among other things, they'll be attempting to simulate the way the human brain processes information and how it pulls off the remarkably difficult task of recognizing the content of images.

That is pretty sweet that 2,000 PS3s can perform at 500 teraflops. That means a petaflop system would only require 4,000 consoles, and only cost $1.2 million.