National Security

The Ultimate War Game

By Mark Thompson | @MarkThompson_DC | December 2, 2010 | +

The Pentagon has just launched a supercomputer assembled from 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 processors. But military scientists who brought the computer online yesterday probably won’t be playing PS3 games like Call of Duty: Black Ops, God of War, or Killzone 3. The Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate at Rome, N.Y., bolted the PS3 processors to other computer gear to create the $2 million Condor Cluster for artificial-intelligence research, synthetic-aperture-radar enhancement, image enhancement and pattern-recognition research. The gaming industry’s push toward more powerful computing consoles has made its gear attractive to military researchers, at 5 to 10 percent the cost of a military-developed system.

Related Topics: Air force, playstation 3, supercomputer, National Security

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  • newfreedomblog

    “…at 5 to 10 percent the cost of a military-developed system.”

    .
    You mean when the private sector is allowed, it can cut costs greatly? Wow!!

  • http://gum0nshoe.wordpress.com gumOnShoe

    Skynet, lol

  • michaelfury
  • doneck

    The private sector builds all computers. It is the Air Force that cut costs by recognizing a good deal.

  • Sebastian

    Excuse me if I get anything wrong, Mr. Newfree, but I have got two questions to you.

    1) Are not a lot of military development expenses going to the private sector already (Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to name just two examples)?

    2) You are a supporter of the Republican Party, aren’t you? Is not your party staunchly against cuts to military spending? If the answer to (1) is affirmative, then are you saying that even with the private sector, things need to be godd*mn expensive? Or if not, why don’t Republicans push harder for privatizing military development, like for private everything else?

    Thanks for your thoughts.

  • 11charlie

    Yep, the same private sector that built the B-2 bomber (2 billion dollars a copy), and the F-22 fighter (350 million dollars a copy).

  • chicagoindependant

    Part of the reason it was so much cheaper, is Sony sells the PS3 at a loss to make up the money on games. Obviously this means they sell a very powerful computer at below even private market costs.

    Also – it has nothing to do with the private sector offering savings. As doneck notes, the savings came from a government bureaucrat (in the Airforce) figuring out they could save money by buying off the shelf components rather than build from scratch. To try to squeeze this into the paradigm of government is bad, private sector is good, is infantile.

  • http://forgottenlord.livejournal.com forgottenlord

    I haven’t been able to confirm whether this really happened or if it was an urban myth, but according to one tech site I read, an Eastern European nation, bringing in a brand new set of fighters, instead of paying the defense contractor some absurd amount of money for the simulators, contracted a computer game company who already had a successful flight simulator and had them upgrade their game engine sufficient that it could interface with a full cockpit simulator. Apparently, they felt it was an astronomical success.

  • http://erieangel.wordpress.com erieangel

    I’d heard the same thing but I goggled for it and nothing came up.

  • 11charlie

    Don’t forget WOPR and Collosus.

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