How the PlayStation 3 Changed Supercomputing

In order to analyze satellite imagery efficiently, the United States Air Force built an advanced supercomputer out of cutting-edge technology, the PlayStation Three. The seemingly unorthodox method was actually extremely efficient since a single comparable unit cost $10,000 while the PS3 only costed $400 in 2010. It brought the additional advantage of being extremely power efficient, only needing around 10 percent of the power needed to run a typical supercomputer. The cluster consisted of 1760 PlayStations that were all connected with the addition of 168 graphical processing units and 84 servers. The super cluster nicknamed “The Condor Cluster” was extremely powerful and was able to output 500 TeraFLOPS, which means that the cluster is able to compute five hundred trillion operations such as multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division in one second.

Since the PS3 simply does not come with the option to be run as a cog of a large supercomputer cluster, the Air Force needed to modify the PlayStation’s software by running a specialized version of Linux on the system, which was an option built into PS3s. While this was the largest Playstation Cluster, it was not the first. Blackhole researcher Gaurav Khanna was struggling to find funding for a supercomputer to simulate pure periods on blackholes. After hearing news that the PS3 ran on an IBM cell chip that was similar to the one used in supercomputers, Khanna figured that he could use PS3s to create a supercomputer of his own. After months of arduous work in code, he was able to put together 176 PS3s and create a supercomputer at a fraction of the cost of a typical one and was able to run extremely complex models. The cluster was able to dominate in cryptography contests which require a great deal of brute force operations to be completed extremely quickly. This discovery became the foundation for the Condor Cluster which was the 35th fastest supercomputer at that time.

However, technology advanced and the newer consoles such as the PS4 or PS3 slim removed the capability to run Linux due to hacking concerns. In fact, the military had to specifically request old versions of the PS3 from Sony in order to run Linux.  Modern supercomputing technology from companies such as Nvidia now dominates the market and the era of PlayStation computing has ended. Still, the PS3 was able to make supercomputing more affordable and efficient and was able to shift the computing scene.