The Air Force Built One of the World's Fastest Computers Out of PlayStations

When the PlayStation 2 was first released to the public, it was said the computer inside was so powerful, it could be used to launch nuclear weapons. It was a stunning comparison. In response, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein opted to try and buy up thousands of the gaming consoles, so many that the U.S. government had to impose export restrictions.

But it seems Saddam gave the Air Force an idea: building a supercomputer from many PlayStations.

Just 10 years after Saddam tried to take over the world using thousands of gaming consoles, the United States Air Force took over the role of mad computer scientist and created the world's 33rd-fastest computer inside its own Air Force Research Laboratory.

Only instead of PlayStation 2, the Air Force used 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 consoles. They called it the "Condor Cluster," and it was the Department of Defense's fastest computer.

The USAF put the computer in Rome, New York, near Syracuse, and intended to use the computer for radar enhancement, pattern recognition, satellite imagery processing and artificial intelligence research for current and future Air Force projects and operations.

Processing imagery is the computer's primary function, and it performs that function miraculously well. It can analyze ultra-high-resolution images very quickly, at a rate of billions of pixels per minute. But why use PlayStation consoles instead of an actual computer or other proprietary technology? Because a PlayStation cost $300 at the time, and the latest and greatest tech in imagery processing would have run the USAF a much heftier cost per unit. Together, the PlayStations formed the core of the computer for a cost of roughly $1 million.

The result was a 500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster powered by PS3s but connected to subcluster heads of dual-quad Xeons with multiple GPGPUs (general-purpose graphics processing units). The video-game consoles consumed 90% less energy than any alternative.

If the Air Force had built a special machine with more traditional components to create a processing center, the branch could have paid upward of $10 million, and the system would not have been as energy efficient.

It was the PlayStation's ability to install other operating systems that allowed for this cluster -- and is what endangered the program.

In 2010, Sony pushed a PlayStation firmware update that revoked the device's ability to install alternate operating systems, like the Linux OS the Air Force used in its supercomputer cluster. The Air Force unboxed hundreds of PlayStations, and after imaging each unit to run Linux, Sony ran updates on them a few weeks later.

The Air Force, of course, didn't need the firmware update, nor could Sony force it on those devices. But if one of the USAF's PlayStations went down, it would be the end of the cluster. Any device refurbished or newly purchased would lack the ability to run Linux.

The firmware update was the death knell for the supercomputer and others like it that had been produced by academic institutions. There was never any word on whether Saddam ever created his supercomputer.

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