Sony’s PlayStation 3 is proving itself to be much more than a simple gaming system. The console’s price-to-performance ratio inspired one Air Force research team to place an order for 1,700 of them to go with the 336 they already have, and no, it’s not for their new USO center.

The Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., is clustering the consoles, along with some off-the-shelf graphic processing units, to create a supercomputer nearly 100,000 times faster than high-end computer processors sold today. Key to the whole idea is the console’s cell processor, which was designed to easily work in concert with other cell processors to combine processing power and has been critically acclaimed for its number crunching ability. This lets the researchers leverage power toward running such applications as Back Projection Synthetic Aperture Radar Imager formation, high definition video image processing, and Neuromorphic Computing, which mimics human nervous systems. Because of the way the consoles connect online or to each other is relatively slow compared to regular supercomputing setups, the group is limited in what type of programs can be efficiently run on the PS3 supergroup they call the 500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster.

Source: Stars and Stripes