US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build supercomputer (2010)

Re:US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build supe... by dragontamer on Friday July 22, 2022 @11:49AM (#32193283)

IBM cell processor was incredibly expensive.

The PS3 probably was the cheapest way to play with it in practice. There is a reason why modern GPUs share an architecture with video gamers.

It's not about technical advancement, as much as economics. There are two groups of people who want TFlops of SIMD compute. Supercomputer groups, and video gamers.

Cell / PS3 was one attempt at making one device work with both groups, sharing research and economic investment.

NVidia over the next 15 years would execute these economics better however.

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Re:US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build supe... by solardev on Friday July 22, 2022 @12:22PM (#32193785)

> There are two groups of people who want TFlops of SIMD compute. Supercomputer groups, and video gamers.

And crypto people, unfortunately :(

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Re:US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build supe... by ceeplusplus on Friday July 22, 2022 @02:23PM (#32195403)

Eh, Eth miners want memory bandwidth, which is increasingly no longer correlated to compute power.

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Re:US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build supe... by cowtools on Friday July 22, 2022 @12:31PM (#32193901)

Depends on Proof-Of-Work method.

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Re:US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build supe... by klodolph on Friday July 22, 2022 @01:04PM (#32194364)

I mean, it’s also true that not all supercomputer groups want TFLOPS of SIMD. Some video gamers are happy with consoles made in the 1990s. Why single out the crypto people?

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Re:US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build supe... by freemint on Friday July 22, 2022 @04:10PM (#32196550)

90s console very much also had SIMD it was just in more fixed function hardware, DSPs or the like.

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