Air Force Still Using PS3 as 33rd Largest Computer

They should sell those off on ebay for $80 bucks each.

that must of got on Sony's nerve lol... HPC at the loss of Sony

Classics, IMO, look better than the new PS3's.

D: all i want is just one

$10,000? Divide that by 1,760, it means they bought each PS3 for $5.68? I don't think that's accurate. Hell, they have laptops that cost $10k.

"To get the same level of power, the USAF would have had to spend $10,000 to get ths same as what could be done by a PS3 at the fraction of the cost"

Read that again They would have had to invest 10k PER module, not 10k for all the PS3s.

So...

$ 17,600,000 vs $ 528,000

Great savings there!

This "supercomputer" is purely a marketing gimmick by the Air Force, to make them attract people from the gamer audience. The Air Force, as I'd learned, is desperate to reach out to that sort of demographic, and they feel that by boasting they have a lot of PS3s, they can make themselves seem better to these potential recruits.

Well, here's the lowdown: the the PS3 makes a terrible supercomputer node. Why's that? It's because its Cell processor was not designed for double-precision. The PS3's CPU gets an admirable 211.2 Gigaflops of performance in single-precision math... But single-precision is only good for media and gaming tasks. Actual scientific, engineering, and HPC tasks NEED double-precision. And at that... The Cell trails badly, dropping to about 32 gigaflops.

Computers are an engineering thing: you CAN'T have a design that's best at everything. You have to sacrifice one thing to get another. The PS3 sacrifices any real supercomputing capability in order to be good at being both a gaming machine, and a high-definition media center/Blu-ray player. The flip side is that for this "PS3 cluster," the Air Force is only getting a measly 56.32 Teraflops of actual supercomputer power. (the RSX is a GeForce design that pre-dates CUDA)

If they wanted a real supercomputer, they'd use IBM's modified supercomputer variant of the Cell, the PowerXCell 8i. This is what's ACTUALLY used for supercomputers: it natively handles double-precision, and gets 108.8 gigaflops instead of only 32. That would bump the machine up to nearly 200 teraflops of power, which would put it in REAL major supercomputer territory. That, and IBM MAKES PowerXCell blades that are made for this, and are VASTLY more energy-efficient than using PS3s.

It's kinda telling: you look at the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and not a single one uses a PS3. But many of them use the PowerXCell. (including a former #1, RoadRunner) That demonstrates that this Air Force machine is all for show.

@nottheking

I'll sleep better tonight knowing you're smarter than then entire United States Air Force in their decision making.

How many PS3s does it take to find Osama bin Laden?

More than 1,760 apparently!

Or is the USAF not in charge of analyzing satellite imagery?

Dude - it's called parallel processing.

And you also must not have read the COST part of the story, huh???

For the record a "Condor Cluster" is any cluster based computer which uses condor as its job manager. My university for example has a condor cluster as well.

Anyone interested in the condor software, its free and can be found here: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/

They are using it to process satellite images, not for creating scientific models. With image processing single precision works very well and it IS very powerful at 317 teraflops which I would say qualifies it as a supercomputer.

your both wrong...they saved 10k....

I wouldn't.



Still, even if their design is to use single-precision math only, the PS3 still makes a terrible choice: you're still spending all that money (and burning all that electricity) on parts that will still draw some even though they don't contribute. Remember me mentioning that the GPU's functions, even if NOT locked-out by Sony's firmware, are useless for GPGPU: the RSX is a modified G71, while CUDA requires a G80 or later.

In that case, a true GPGPU solution would've been better; $400 got them a single 211.2 Gigaflop PS3, but $100 buys a 1-teraflop Radeon 4850. Both require additional hardware to set them up in a network. (hence why the PS3s only accounted for $704,000US out of the $2US million price given) Assuming a similar x3 price to turn the base hardware into a supercomputer network, that means where the DoD spent $2US million on a PS3 supercomputer, a comparable-power 4850-based setup would've run them about $100,000US. In other words, about the opposite of the ratio they gave; while they claimed the PS3 let them spend 1/20th-1/25th as much, in reality, a 4850-based setup would've let them do it for 1/20th the cost of the PS3 setup.

k,smartass let's see how smart you really are....

It ain't a supercomputer no more after sony updated it's firmware to remove Other OS.

I'm gonna have to go with nott on this one. Simply because it makes sense. And it's not that he's smarter then the Air Force, but they do do some stupid ass shit. Just like the army does. Now with that said we don't really know how much they paid for the ps3. They could've worked out a really great deal with sony that made it worth it.

Then again it is the Air Force and just like the Army they probably paid more then retail price for each one lol.

Maybe they just needed the PS3 cluster to play Crysis 2?

Video games helping society. Beautiful.

You seem to have missed a key point...for $400 (or less) they have a ready to deploy node...your 4850 (while powerful for computing no doubt) still needs the rest of a computer to make it operational. Part of why they chose this is for the ease of deployment for the cost. It was also almost definitely easier to design their software to run on full-fledged CPUs instead of a GPU that would need to have all the code ported to the new architecture.

And as was said again....I am sure you are just that much smarter than them. I know they are "only the government" but they tend to get a lot right in regards to technology (NOT talking policies here)

plus there best bet was to run Linux and as far as im aware (unless its changed in the last 6 months to a year) ATI drivers for Linux are crap and wont handle the GPGPU functions of the radeon. other wise you would have to install windows at $100+ a pop.. Linux is free and can be customized any way you want to streamline the system.

The DoD wastes SO much money every year. I don't understand why this is hard for anyone to believe that it's a gimmick.

Actually, YOU were the one that missed the point: if you'd read the article, you'd note that the PS3s required a lot of extra "more conventional hardware" to make them function, and you also might notice that the total cost mentioned in the article was ~$2,000,000US for 1760 nodes: that meant that on top of the $400US for the PS3, they spent $736US extra PER console to make it set up: hardly "ready to deploy." My whole post noted that in both cases, neither solution was stand-alone: it needed other parts.

Plus there's the limitations of architecture: the PS3 has a grand total of 256MB of RAM on the CPU, (the GPU can freely access the CPU's RAM, but not vice-versa) and interconnects with gigabit Ethernet. With that 4850, the card alone has potentially 1GB of RAM, (they close to the same as 512MB cards, currently) and you can get 10G Ethernet if you wanted.

Any word on what they're planning on running on it or how hard it is to get stuff to run on it?

That seems like my ideal living room.

the cluster contains 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 units and 168 GPU based units with an estimated computing power of 500 teraflops. That places Condor among the top 50 of the world's fastest systems. The cost of the cluster was only $2 million when comparable systems at that performance level would cost at least $20 million to $40 million.

Seems like if wasn't really a waist to me.

the quoted post totally shows how garbage our educational system is.

can't even read a simply post. this is just sad.

Honestly I find myself agreeing with this guy. PS3s dont seem like the best choice to make a super computer with. Not to say that is isnt an impressive super computer set up, but arent we pulling way ahead of this stuff with CUDA by now?

but can it...

...aw shucks.

yeah they should have spent 2 million dollars on a Superbowl commercial and embossed pencils and backpacks emblazoned with the air-force logo for high school seniors kids instead of building this gimmick that also actually does something useful.

Oh, I see someone's throwing a fit and down-voting comments that prove them wrong now? Tsk, tsk.

Well then, take a GeForce card instead of an ATi one... Though the "Radeon can't do Linux" schtick is a little old, (say, by almost a decade) and only applied to 3D, not OpenCL; case-in-point: the original configuration of Tianhe-1 was using 5,120 Radeon 4870X2s. I wasn't even suggesting Windows would be used: it's kinda telling that Linux monopolizes the TOP500 list.



Remember that 500 teraflop figure is SINGLE-precision: it's far easier/cheaper to get a bigger number in single-precision, so you can't compare it to the "1 petaflop" figures from the top machines. It's a false comparison to label it as among the "top 50 computers in the world;" that's a bit of foolery that both console and GPU makers are all too glad to trick people with. Similar is using the THEORETICAL peak powers, while the numbers given for the TOP500 list are all real-world benchmark results.

After all, if we relaxed the specifications to single-precision only, Tianhe-1 would shoot up from its theoretical peak of 4.701 Petaflops to well over 10 Petaflops: the Tesla cards ALONE would add an additional 5.5 petaflops; the Xeons would ad at least another 1 petaflop going into single-precision, as that'd let them make full use of SSE to its full extent. Total theoretical power would be akin to >11,200 teraflops... Suddenly that 500 teraflop figure doesn't sound so impressive anymore, does it?