’11/17/2010 – ROME, N.Y. — The Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate at Rome N.Y. will conduct a ribbon cutting Dec. 1 on a most unlikely supercomputer: a cluster of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 processors and 168 general-purpose Graphical Processing Units.
Nicknamed the Condor Cluster, the PlayStation 3 processors are linked with some more conventional equipment. By effectively adapting advanced gaming technology already on the market, the military has leveraged off-the-shelf equipment into remarkably affordable supercomputing, AFRL Information Directorate officials said.
“AFRL Rome’s ribbon cutting will be a significant event in the history of supercomputing,” said Mark Barnell, director of AFRL’s High Power Computing. “Condor is a 500 TFLOPS supercomputer.”
….”The total cost of the Condor system was approximately $2 million, which is a cost savings of between 10 and 20 times for the equivalent capability,” according to Mr. Barnell.’
