1700 PlayStation 3s for One Top-Secret Mission – The US Air Force’s Intriguing Purchase Explained

Over the years, Sony’s PlayStation has given users an experience of what it’s like to be a part of the military with games like Call of Duty and Metal Gear Solid. But there was a time when it actually served a purpose in the real United States Air Force. The Force had made a supercomputer using 1700 PS3s! 

Back in 2010, the US Air Force needed a supercomputer for radar enhancement, satellite imagery, and AI research. The core components needed for the computer cost over $10,000 per unit. But after a bit of research, the engineers found out that the components were sold much more cheaply in the form of PlayStation 3s, which had cutting-edge graphical capabilities at the time. 

US Army and their Super Computer made of 1700 PlayStation 3s 

The Super Computer, made of PlayStations, was able to complete about 500 trillion calculations per second, making it 50,000 times more powerful than an average laptop. It incorporated 168 separate graphical processing units to deliver the most accurate image possible. Even in terms of accuracy, the computer was a behemoth. 

It had the capability of reading 20 pages of information every second. Even when 20% to 30% of the characters were removed from a page, it was able to recover all the sentences with 99.99% accuracy. The supercomputer was named the Condor, and it cost 10 times less than any other system with similar capabilities. 

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Director of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s high-power computing division, Mark Barnell, said, “the total cost of the Condor system was approximately $2 million, which is a cost savings of between 10 and 20 times for the equivalent capability.” With that statement, it is apparent that without integrating PlayStation, the Condor would have cost around $20–$40 million to build at that time. 

“So from a price performance, we’d probably beat all of them, but the biggest thing for us was the particular applications, and the hardware we chose to build this computer with purposefully matches those applications well,” said Mr. Barnell. Explaining that even after being composed of gaming consoles, the computer was capable of doing its job.

Although they didn’t specify the applications that the computer’s going to run or if it’s going to help in the country’s security, Mr. Barnell gave a tease, saying that they need to “do some things that we need to get done with this particular supercomputer.”

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