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"Running on more than 1,700 PS3s that were connected by five miles of wire, the Condor Cluster was huge, dwarfing Khanna’s project, and it used to process image
by bretpiatt 6y ago
"Running on more than 1,700 PS3s that were connected by five miles of wire, the Condor Cluster was huge, dwarfing Khanna’s project, and it used to process images from surveillance drones. During its heyday, it was the 35th fastest supercomputer in the world."*
Back at PS2/PS3 they were used for computing, Sony actually released a kit and had paid staff helping people who wanted to build PS2 supercomputers -- a good friend from college worked on the project at Sony. They had amazing vector processing units in them.
* https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supercomputer-ps3-umass-dartmouth-astrophysics-25th-anniversary https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...
Article from 2003 on PS2 setups https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer
- derefr 6y agoSure, but this still only consumed a tiny fraction of the Playstations in production at the time, rather than ~all of them. There are only so many HPC labs in the world (and an HPC lab using PS3s is a font of good press coverage for Sony!) while there are as many crypto-miners as the market will bear (and they generate only negative press coverage on top.)
- friedman23 6y agoSony disabled this functionality later on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS