AF building out its PS3 cluster with another 2200 consoles

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InformationWeek reported late last week that the Air Force is set to buy another 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3’s for its existing cluster

The PlayStation 3s will be used at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s information directorate in Rome, N.Y., where they will be added to an existing cluster of 336 PlayStation 3s being used to conduct supercomputing research.

The Air Force will use the system to “to determine the best fit for implementation of various applications,” including commercial and internally developed software specific to the PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processor architecture. The research will help the Air Force decide where Cell Broadband Engine processor-derived hardware and software could be used in military systems.

The AF is using the cluster for a variety of things, including radar image processing. More in the article.