The PS3 Gets Wings
When Sony made the Playstation 3, they must have had Swiss Army Knives in mind. The PS3’s massive processing power has been used by the folding@home disease research foundation for quite some time, and just last week began working to put a stop to child pornography. The U.S. Air Force has apparently found a new use for the console as well. They had previously owned 336 systems to use in their labs, but have just purchased 2,200 units to add to their collection.
In its Air Force employment, the PS3 has been used to study Back Projection Synthetic Aperture Radar Imager formation, High Definition Video image processing, and even Neuromorphic Computing. The new consoles will be put to similarly high tech uses when they work to solve the problems of Advanced Computing Architectures and High Performance Embedded Computing among other things.
The apparent reason behind the PS3’s value is not so much its power, but its price tag. The Air Force requisition form that ordered the PS3’s explained their value by stating:
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 gigaflops, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 gigaflops, the approximately tenfold cost difference per gigaflops makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for [high performance computing] applications.
With all of this high-tech usefulness, I wonder what else we could possibly use the PS3 for. Any ideas? I was thinking that maybe having more complex, better games may be a good use for a gaming console, but that’s just me. I mean, sure, there’s nothing wrong with using the PS3 to do some good in the world, but shouldn’t their be better tools for it?
Source: Information Week
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