US Air Force builds supercomputer with PS3's

The United States Air Force streak of weird requests won't stop anytime soon, and they're proving that with their recent order of 1,700 PlayStation 3's for one of their facilities stationed in Rome, NY. And if you're thinking that the Air Force is way into gaming now -- think again. These PS3's are going to be used for a research lab to build one huge supercomputer.

 

Called the "500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster," this device will apparently be playing 2,000 simultaneous games of God of War III. They will also be using the supercomputer to study how the human brain processes information.

 

"Humans can routinely do these things, but a computer struggles to do it.  In a general sense, we are interested in making it autonomous," the research lab's computing director Mark Barnell stated in an interview with Stars and Stripes.

 

As it won't be as efficient as a more advanced supercomputer, it will be less energy-consuming -- and apparently environment-friendly, as well.

 

David Gabriel, NoobFeed.