I heard awhile back that the U.S. Air Force had ordered 2,200 PlayStation 3′s (PS3′s). Now they are building an off-the-shelf supercomputer by clustering those PS3 consoles. By supporting the Folding@home distributed computing project, PlayStation’s gaming console may be some of the cheapest computing power you can buy, and the Air Force caught on to that fact.
For only a fraction of the cost, the Air Force’s new off-the-shelf Super-Playstation will have 500 teraflops of performance, the same as IBM’s Blue Gene “Dawn” supercomputer (but much cheaper). The current IBM solution available, the Roadrunner supercomputer, costs $100 million to implement. The 2,200 PlayStations cost only $650,000, and the entire clustered solution is about $2 million – significantly cheaper than IBM’s current supercomputing solutions.
It deserves mention, however, that the first person to use PlayStations as a supercomputer was Guarav Khanna, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. He used eight PS3′s at a cost of only $4,000 to create a supercomputer, then published an open-source guide on his discovery at http://www.ps3cluster.umassd.edu.
Another new solution that seems to be being overlooked by the government sector is NVIDIA’s Tesla, advertised as “Supercomputing at 1/10th the Cost.” This would not be as cost-effective as the PS3 solution if you needed hundreds of teraflops of processing power, but for smaller solutions this is a great way to go. Tesla solutions have already been developed allowing 3 or 4 Tesla’s to be placed in a desktop computer, effectively creating a local supercomputer for approximately $10,000 that would be capable of 3-4 teraflops. The rack-mounted solutions can accomplish significantly more. Here’s a short video about the Tesla if you’re interested:
Anyways, just some more great ideas to get some supercomputing power on your desktop, whether you go with aSuper-PlayStation or NVIDIA’s Tesla. I’m glad that the Air Force is being innovative and thinking outside of the box to develop supercomputing solutions. It’s allowing them to accomplish more while minimizing costs, thus saving the taxpayer money AND increasing our nation’s capabilities at the same time. Way to go Guarav Khanna for developing the solution and great job to the Air Force for paying attention and implementing it on a larger scale.
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