Late last year, it was reported on Computerworld.com that the United States Air Force issued a request for proposals to purchase 2,200 Sony Playstation 3 video game console.

Of course, they are not planning to play Modern Warfare 2. The Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome New York is interested in the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, a chip technology inside the PS3 according to Gartner Inc. analyst Andrea DiMaio blog post.

The USAF are looking into whether the PS3 chips could be a cost-effective technology for modernizing the military's high-performance computing system.

The Air Force already has 336 PS3 consoles hooked together in what is called an experimental Linux-based cluster. In order to expand the research project, they want more than 2,200 PS3 from Sony since other vendors such as IBM and Intel Corp. are more expensive.

The RFP-related document jusitified the purchase that a single 1U server configured with two 3.2-GHz cell processors can cost up to $8k while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. A single 3.2-GHz cell processor is capable of delivering 200 GLOPS, where as the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS. A total savings of $7k.

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DiMaio said the Air Force's interest in the PS3 is in line with the trend toward the consumerization of IT. "This is a pristine example of how consumer technology can be used in pretty demanding government contexts -- although still in an R&D rather than operational capacity," she wrote.

The Air Force said the PS3 Cell processor has shown strong potential for applications such as high-definition video image processing and "neuromorphic computing," which mimics the neuro-biological architecture of the human nervous system.

"The additional PS3s will allow the R&D community to expand its current capabilities and investigate other applications that require many more processors to perform real-time tasks," the Air Force document said.
Link: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/345642/Air_Force_Taps_PlayStation_3_for_Research