Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation
In 2010, while PS3 owners were lining up corners in Gran Turismo 5, the U.S. Air Force had a rather different job for Sony’s console. Its researchers had assembled a roomful of PlayStations into a supercomputer called the Condor Cluster.
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate in Rome, New York, announced a December 1 ribbon cutting for a system built around 1,760 PS3 processors. Those black boxes had left the entertainment center for racks of research equipment, with considerably more cabling than the average living room.
A very different multiplayer setup
The PS3s were part of a larger team. The Air Force’s announcement also listed 168 general-purpose graphics processors. Contemporary reporting described 84 coordinating servers alongside the consoles. Condor was a mixed collection of hardware working together, rather than 1,760 machines running an enormous game.
Researchers wanted to put that equipment to work on image processing, radar enhancement, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. The console hardware familiar from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and LittleBigPlanet had found a second career far from a controller.
Why buy PlayStations?
Price was a large part of the attraction. Contemporary coverage put the build at roughly $2 million and reported that it cost only 5 to 10 percent as much as comparable systems. The same reporting described power consumption at about a tenth of a comparable supercomputer’s. Those were comparisons reported for this project at the time, rather than promises about every workload or every competing machine.
Project director Mark Barnell explained the practical advantage in a December 2010 Air Force interview: the team had chosen hardware that suited its particular applications. Condor did not need to perform every job that a much larger general-purpose supercomputer could handle.
Barnell described performance of about 500 trillion calculations per second. He also discussed experiments in reconstructing damaged text, with the system attempting to recover missing characters and words. These PlayStations had quite a reading assignment.
A small wrinkle in the famous number
The 1,760 figure appears in the Air Force’s advance announcement and contemporary coverage. A December 6 Air Force article instead gives 1,716 consoles. The reports disagree, so the familiar 1,760 figure is best understood as the announced configuration. Either way, the central fact survives: the Air Force really did build a research supercomputer using well over a thousand PlayStation 3s.
Sources
- Air Force Research Laboratory: AFRL to hold ribbon cutting for Condor supercomputer, November 17, 2010. Announced configuration and ceremony date.
- U.S. Air Force: PlayStation 3 supercomputer can read, correct input, December 6, 2010. Barnell’s account, research applications and the differing console count.
- Phys.org: US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3’s to build supercomputer, December 2, 2010. Contemporary reporting of hardware, cost and power comparisons.
- Air & Space Forces Magazine: AFRL Unveils Condor Cluster Supercomputer, December 3, 2010. Research purposes and unveiling.
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