US Air Force Made A Supercomputer With PlayStations

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In 2010, the US Air Force bought 1760 supercomputers. They connected all of them and made a supercomputer!

In the 2000s, Sony launched a feature called “OtherOS” for the PlayStation 3 to install other operating systems. Although this feature was later removed, hackers could still jailbreak through custom firmware.

The Air Force then decided to make the “Condor Cluster” utilizing the PS3’s superior processing capabilities. The Condor Cluster could operate at 500 TFLOPS and cost 5-10% of a real supercomputer.

Each PlayStation cost around $400 whereas equivalent technology for a supercomputer would cost around $10,000 per unit. The Condor Cluster also managed to work using only 10% of the energy of a supercomputer with comparable performance.

The PS3 used the IBM Cell processor which was famously decribed by Valve’s Gabe Newell (GabeN) as a “waste of everyone’s time.”

The PS3 had a unique hardware architecture. It was highly capable of parallel processing. Nothing else in that price range was comparable.

The engineers at the Air Force were able to utilize Message Passing Interface (MPI) to connect the seven Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) of each unit which basically resembled modern GPU cores. This enabled the Condor Cluster to handle a lot of simple math and handle a lot of data in parallel.

Eventually, this feature was completely removed not just for security and privacy reasons but because companies like Sony intentionally started selling consoles at a slight loss (making profits through other means). This meant highly capable hardware and complex features like OtherOS even more difficult to implement. In short - capitalism.

Fun Fact: The Condor Cluster was the world’s 33rd most powerful computer in 2010!

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