Monday, December 07, 2009
Does the Air Force plan to play lots of Grand Theft Auto?
Nope.
A few days ago I came across a request for proposals issued by the US Air Force Materiel Command to purchase 2,200 Sony Playstation 3 (PS3).The Air Force is studying whether the PS3 chips could be a cost-effective technology for modernizing the military's high-performance computing systems.
It is actually President Obama response to budget deficit constraint.
With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.
A few days ago I came across a request for proposals issued by the US Air Force Materiel Command to purchase 2,200 Sony Playstation 3 (PS3).The Air Force is studying whether the PS3 chips could be a cost-effective technology for modernizing the military's high-performance computing systems.
It is actually President Obama response to budget deficit constraint.
With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.
THIS LINK posted by Joseph Bell : 12:54 PM
