The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has marked the launch of its new supercomputer, the Condor PS3 Cluster. This is the biggest and fastest interactive computer that the Defense Department has and is the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world, built from a graphics-focused supercomputer based on 1,760 Sony Playstation 3 cell processors and 168 more general-purpose GPUs. This is built by the US Department of Defense engineers and Sony.

“This particular system is about half a petaflop, or capable of about 500 trillion calculations per second. In the current time that we can measure it, it’s about the 35th- or 36th-fastest computer in the world, and with some things that are going to be changing in the next eight or nine months with some upgrades, we could boost it to maybe the 20th-fastest computer in the world, and at the same time make it, at that moment in time, the greenest computer,” Said Mark Barnell, director of high-performance computing and the Condor Cluster project at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

The cluster, which is housed in Rome, New York, will be used for research by the Air Force service branches and centers across the country. The Condor Cluster will be available to all DoD users on a shared basis. It will allow very fast analysis of large high-resolution imagery- billions of pixels a minute, taking what used to take several hours down to mere seconds. Thus, the computer will reportedly be used for quick processing of ultra-high-resolution satellite imagery, as well as research into artificial intelligence, radar enhancement and pattern recognition.

The total cost for the cluster came in around $2 million while its comparable systems would cost at least $20 million to $40 million.

via dvids