The US Department of Defense, announced that it will upgrade its supercomputer cluster with 2200 Sony’s PlayStation 3 video game console. After Sony’s latest price cut of PS3the DoD saw their chance and ordered no less than 2200 units from the video game console manufacturer. This may sound a bit odd to order thousands of video game consoles to become the backbone of the supercomputer used by the US military, but there is actually sound reasoning for it.
Sony has pushed the prices of its Cell-equipped PS3 consoles so low that they cost a mere tenth of what a similar 1U server sporting two 3.2GHz Cell processor costs. And the performance of two PS3 consoles is almost identical. Sony sells the video game consoles at a loss and hopes to cover this with game sales, but Sony can’t really count on the DoD to help there.
With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.
Exactly what kind of calculations and research the supercomputer will be used for wasn’t revealed, but the 2200 new units will join up with the already existing cluster of 336 PS3s that are already running at the DoD.
