Jeru Da Damaja said it best on the Return of the Crooklyn Dodgers '95 when he said that "chips that power nuclear bombs, power my Sega." The converse of that statement will soon be true in that the chips that rock your video game system will soon rock military supercomputers. Check out this new proposal by the U.S. Air Force to purchase 1,700 PS3s.
Source: The Industry Standard
The U.S. Air Force recently issued a request for proposals to purchase 2,200 (note: the request was reduced to 1,700 systems) Sony PlayStation 3 video game consoles. Does the Air Force plan to play lots of Grand Theft Auto?
No -- rather, the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., is interested in the chip technology inside the PS3, specifically the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, according a blog post by Gartner Inc. analyst Andrea DiMaio . The Air Force is studying whether the PS3 chips could be a cost-effective technology for modernizing the military's high-performance computing systems.
Supercomputer experts at the Air Force already have 336 PS3 consoles hooked together in an experimental Linux-based cluster. Now they want 2,200 more to expand the research project. The laboratory evaluated chips from other vendors, such as IBM and Intel Corp., but found the PS3 chips to be much cheaper.
Source: The Industry Standard
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