An interesting story has appeared on UGO.com regarding a U.S Air Force research group in New York purchasing 2,000 Sony PlayStation 3s to create a supercomputer on the cheap.

Titled the 500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster, the collection of consoles will run the Back Projection Synthetic Aperture Radar application, fly through high-definition video processing, mimic human nervous systems and other things.

"Mimicking humans will help the machine recognize images for target recognition," high performance computing director Mark Barnell said. "Humans can routinely do these things, but a computer struggles to do it. In a general sense, we are interested in making it autonomous."

He put those at the top of the supercomputer chain at rest by jokingly saying "this is not the Holy Grail of supercomputers."

The main reason for the systems creation is its power usage, which is significantly less compared to that of a regular supercomputer. While a supercomputer will use 5 megawatts, the cluster of PS3s will hit 300 to 320 kilowatts at most.

The PlayStation 3's cell processor was also designed to work easily with others.

Senior laboratory scientist Dr. Richard Linderman commented "by taking advantage of a growing market, the gaming market, we are bringing the price performance to just $2 to $3 per gigaFLOPS."

The PlayStation 3 is not only one of the best home entertainment consoles, it can now proudly tag itself as a 'supercomputer forger.'

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Picture credit: Stripes
Sources: UGO.com, Stripes