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Almost 2,000 Sony PlayStation game consoles have been networked by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to create an affordable supercomputer that is being used to develop techniques to process and analyze huge quantities of imagery from wide-area surveillance systems. The Condor Cluster created by AFRL’s Information Division at Rome AFB, N.Y., comprises 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles and 168 high-performance graphics processors connected by a high-bandwidth network. The cluster has a peak performance of 500 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second). Built for about $2 million, the Condor is the 34th most powerful supercomputer in the world, but it...

When US Air Force researchers last year created the mother-of-all-processors using Sony PlayStation-3 game consoles, it seemed like a stroke of cost-saving genius.To deliver a 53-TerraFLOP processing cluster, the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., hoovered up 1,700 PlayStation-3 game consoles, then harnessed the power of their combined processors to evaluate new breakthroughs in technology for synthetic aperture radar, high definition video and something called "neuromorphic computing". At the time, the researchers noted that two PlayStation-3 consoles provide 150 GigaFLOPs of processing power for $600, but a single 3.2GHz cell processor delivers 200 GFLOPs for $8,000. Why spend the...