[HN Gopher] US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build...
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US Air Force connects 1,760 Playstation 3's to build supercomputer
(2010)
Author : jamesdhutton
Score : 106 points
Date : 2022-07-22 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| srvmshr wrote:
| The challenge was not rigging this up - but making things usable
| & efficient. The Cell Broadband Engine was notoriously hard in
| architecture & needed lots of optimization.
|
| Part of the reason why PS4 & Xbox later pivoted towards x86-64
| ISA
| masklinn wrote:
| If you were building a supercomputer the CBE's peculiarities
| (specifically the SPEs) were what you wanted.
|
| And the 360 didn't use SPEs, it has a pretty standard 3-core
| CPU built out of the PPE. The weird-ass structure of the CBE
| was not why it switched (although PPC might be).
| bilekas wrote:
| I would have thought that the CBE was one of the reasons they
| chose the ps3 over conventional servers though ?
| srvmshr wrote:
| In my naive understanding, instead of modern SIMD type
| execution they were using some form of token passing between
| cores to execute instructions async. That made programming
| such multicore APUs pretty hard for the programmer. They had
| a SDK for mitigating some of these pain points. I could be
| somewhat wrong on the specifics (and the fact I last touched
| any architecture related topic about a decade ago).Please
| correct me if I am wrong.
| hypeatei wrote:
| I believe they had to jailbreak these to get Linux installed on
| them.
|
| Just imagining an Air Force employee (?) browsing community
| modding forums and such for older firmware and tools, kinda
| funny.
| paulmd wrote:
| Sony actually officially supported it at the time... and then
| realized that since PS3 was sold at a massive loss, selling
| thousands of units to bulk customers who would never buy any
| games was costing them millions.
|
| Subsequent consoles dropped the "sell the hardware at a loss,
| make it up on games" model, they only lose money during a brief
| window at launch and then economies of scale take over and most
| of the console life it's profitable. It's likely that other
| kinds of hardware also share this model but we just don't hear
| about it - steam deck is running tight margins and day-1 sales
| are more expensive than the "average" unit sold mid-gen or
| late-gen, so similarly they are probably selling day-1 units at
| a loss even if they make a profit on the expected cost.
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns...
|
| Of course... even though sony is selling the hardware at a
| profit, they still maintain the lock-in, just like apple/etc.
| The linux feature never came back even though the reason for
| the removal went away.
| flutas wrote:
| > I believe they had to jailbreak these to get Linux installed
| on them.
|
| OtherOS was a fully supported feature on the PS3, that enabled
| you to install Linux on a secondary partition on the built in
| HDD. At least until George Hotz used it to get hypervisor
| access and exploit the PS3.
|
| This lead to the feature being removed and him being sued by
| Sony.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz#Sony_lawsuit
| humanistbot wrote:
| Nope. PS3s were initially released with a built-in feature to
| install other OSes. This Air Force project got a ton of
| publicity. It directly led to Sony deciding to lock down the
| hardware and firmware on future releases.
| jlink wrote:
| Make me think of this cluster of 200 PS3 that was used in 2009 by
| EPFL to solve the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem:
| https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lacal/articles/112bit_prime/
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > The PS3s are the older, larger variety, since the newer slim
| models don't allow for the installation of Linux.
|
| Big caveat there. Sony later removed the ability to install
| "OtherOS" (a.k.a. Linux or FreeBSD) on PS3s from those models.
| [0] I wonder if that firmware update basically neutered the
| supercomputer or if they were able to keep them from updating
| automatically.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
| eslaught wrote:
| 1. No one updates supercomputers automatically. Instead you
| firewall the compute nodes and have a team dedicated to
| maintenance and support to do periodic upgrades.
|
| 2. I'm sure they had a support contract, which may have
| included running an entirely different firmware. I have no
| specific knowledge, but based on other supercomputers I've
| worked with, these are often very custom machines, despite the
| "commodity" hardware. The odds that they were running the
| consumer version of the firmware are low to nil.
| thetinguy wrote:
| They did not have a support contract.
|
| https://www.syracuse.com/news/2011/03/rome_labs_supercompute.
| ..
|
| > Rome Lab asked the Department of Defense for $2.5 million
| to assemble its supercomputer. By the time money to buy that
| many was approved in 2009, PlayStation 3s were hard to find.
| Rome Lab bought as many as they could -- 1,700.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I can't imagine Sony really gave them custom firmware for
| just 2k units, right? Especially since all the money from a
| console is from games sales. Seems like a lot of work for
| nothing. Maybe they hacked something in on their own though
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Especially since all the money from a console is from
| games sales.
|
| Seems to me like that'd be _more_ reason to offer a support
| contract and recoup some of the profits lost from the lack
| of game sales.
| trimbo wrote:
| Related: Los Alamos' Roadrunner was based on the CELL as a co-
| processor, and was #1 in TOP500 in November 2008.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunner_(supercomputer)
| schaefer wrote:
| I used to crash their (Roadrunner Team's) lunch-time Linux
| kernel study group. So much fun.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I remember reading about the air force buying a lot of ps3's back
| in the 2000s, and that just cemented to me that information is
| power and any government will do all they can to own as much of
| it as possible. IBM just published some quantum breakthrough[1]
| and my first thought was that it will be used by the military or
| intelligence agencies. Hopefully by the time this technology
| trickles down to more corrupt agencies the people will have
| caught up.
|
| You might as well be talking about magic when it comes to quantum
| computing and me, I have no idea if that new openssh standard
| really does protect against a quantum computer trying to break
| it.
|
| 1. https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-claims-to-have-mapped-
| out...
| latchkey wrote:
| In semi-related news...
|
| https://www.techspot.com/news/93980-14800-asrock-mining-rig-...
| smm11 wrote:
| Just think what they're doing with all our phones now.
| marcodiego wrote:
| In the PS2 era I considering buying it and using the "linux kit"
| instead of buying a desktop. I was prepared for the differences
| in performance but then I knew that sony didn't release all the
| drivers or specs and graphic acceleration was not available. Just
| gave up the idea.
|
| The PS3 could be used as a computer, this allowed sony to pay
| less taxes in the EU. Since it is such a closed platform the
| "install other OS" feature could be disable remotely by the
| vendor automatically and, I think, without any user intervention.
| When it became economically "better" for sony, they disable the
| feature.
|
| These are good examples of the problems with such closed systems.
| textcortex wrote:
| Reminds me the scene in Chappy
| omershapira wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember the rumors about Saddam Hussein fusing
| clusters of 15 PS2s to make a UAV realtime controller [1].
|
| To be fair, he could have been more upfront about it. Some
| marketing managers would have shown that at E3.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l3hp2i/did_s...
| chrisma0 wrote:
| This is one of those headlines that initially reads like a joke
| until you think of the economics of it. "cost is about 5-10% of
| the cost of an equivalent system built with off-the-shelf
| computer parts."
|
| I wonder if this is due to the fact that the Playstation hardware
| is (was?) competitively priced to encourage revenue generation
| through games? Or was Sony simply very good at mass-producing
| these units?
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| > There are two groups of people who want TFlops of SIMD
| compute. Supercomputer groups, and video gamers.
|
| And crypto people, unfortunately :(
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Eh, Eth miners want memory bandwidth, which is increasingly
| no longer correlated to compute power.
| cowtools wrote:
| Depends on Proof-Of-Work method.
| klodolph wrote:
| 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?
| freemint wrote:
| 90s console very much also had SIMD it was just in more
| fixed function hardware, DSPs or the like.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >I wonder if this is due to the fact that the Playstation
| hardware is (was?) competitively priced to encourage revenue
| generation through games? Or was Sony simply very good at mass-
| producing these units?
|
| By 2010? Likely both.
| manishsharan wrote:
| I thought PlayStation and XBoxes are subsidized by the Sony and
| Microsoft respectively as they make most of the money off the
| games and the network subscription. Nintendo is the only one
| that does not do that.
| paulmd wrote:
| The PS3 was an extraordinarily expensive console, between the
| cell processor and the bluray drive (iirc this alone was
| several hundred dollars) and in early models also including a
| whole embedded ps2 implementation. So PS3 was sold at a loss,
| and not just a small one, but a _heavy_ loss, like several
| hundred dollars per console, and even still the PS3 was
| derided for being far too expensive. It was a financial
| disaster for sony really, moves like ripping out the embedded
| ps2 make complete sense in that context, and they absolutely
| changed their business model for subsequent consoles.
|
| Since then, consoles moved away from the exotic
| POWER/cell/etc custom hardware towards commodity x86 hardware
| based on integrated x86 APUs and haven't really been sold at
| a loss outside of maybe a small window at launch. PS5 moved
| into hardware profitability about 9 months after launch,
| microsoft said that the xbox series is still sold at a loss
| but I don't believe them because the xbox shouldn't be
| monumentally more expensive to build than the PS5. This is in
| the context of them trying to argue during the apple app
| store lawsuit that their lock-in on xbox store was different
| from the lock-in on the app store, so they have a financial
| incentive to make sure they "run a loss". It's either not
| much of a loss, or it's hollywood accounting and the money is
| going into their other pocket somewhere, like making the xbox
| division pay a parent holding company big licensing fees for
| on every console sold.
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-
| turns...
|
| (again, I don't agree with the "finally" spin here, this
| article was roughly a year after launch and they may have
| been turning a profit for a while before disclosing it... the
| consoles themselves become profitable pretty quickly.)
|
| However, this mindset that "consoles are sold at an initial
| loss" still persists. They're not, Sony has said they're
| selling the PS5 at a profit. Previous generations also
| reached profitability pretty quickly after launch as well.
| It's not 2005 anymore and the ps3 is gone. Slapping some
| GDDR5/GDDR6 on a semi-custom APU is dirt cheap.
|
| Even during the launch window when they do lose money it's
| much smaller, nobody is losing a couple hundred dollars on
| each console anymore like on the PS3, that model is gone.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'm fully willing to believe the Xbox/PS5 is sold at a loss
| today, the margins are so thin that tiny changes in
| component prices could have enormous implications on how
| much money each hardware unit delivers. Neither of these
| consoles are iPhones, they don't have profit margins of 40%
| (or probably any double-digit percentage, for that matter).
| Transitioning from esoteric hardware has pretty much
| nothing to do with it, anyways: the N64, Gamecube and Wii
| all used non-standard architectures while being ludicrously
| profitable. The only truly significant advantage to using
| x86 in a home console is how easy it is to port/develop
| titles for it, not a single current-gen console uses
| commodity hardware besides the Nintendo Switch (since the
| Tegra board is commercially attainable).
| klodolph wrote:
| Nintendo definitely has a different business strategy
| than Sony or Microsoft.
|
| Anyway--the cost of esoteric / more custom hardware got
| higher, that's why the console manufacturers moved away
| from it. It would make sense to shove a lot of custom
| hardware in your 3D video game console in the mid-1990s,
| because there is simply no other way to do good real-time
| 3D, and you have SGI who's willing to sell you chip
| designs.
|
| As time went on, the approach of shoving big custom ASICs
| in your console starts to look worse and worse. Most of
| the CPU vendors that previously sold you all sorts of
| architectures like 68K, MIPS, POWER, Cell, etc. stop
| trying to compete with x86 hegemony. Meanwhile, you're
| making life more difficult for console developers,
| because these custom designs are just so different from
| everything else on the market.
|
| So you get the PS3, which is expensive to manufacture,
| and requires a lot of specialized work to program the
| SPEs (painful for developers). That's two generations
| after the N64, and the world has changed.
|
| I would also be less likely to call the Gamecube/Wii
| architecture exotic, at least compared to the PS3.
| paulmd wrote:
| > I'm fully willing to believe the Xbox/PS5 is sold at a
| loss today,
|
| Given that sony themselves have said they're turning a
| profit, this sounds like a personal exercise in making
| yourself believe a counterfactual. Some people are into
| that though, like the flat earth stuff, or the people who
| think finland exists. See what you can talk yourself into
| believing, even when the facts are right there ;)
|
| Anyway, your personal belief or disbelief or willingness
| to believe or disbelieve is kinda irrelevant here, given
| that sony has said it themselves.
|
| > Transitioning from esoteric hardware has pretty much
| nothing to do with it, anyways
|
| Yeah actually commodity hardware does have a big role in
| bringing down costs. Semi-custom APUs are commodity
| hardware compared to the standards of esoteric Cell/POWER
| stuff, and actually some variants are available off-the-
| shelf as well (see Ryzen 4700S which is a PS5 APu with
| its gpu disabled).
|
| The fact that some custom systems were sold at a profit
| in the past is kinda irrelevant. The era of "commodity
| x86 APU with a wide gpu and GDDR memory" is qualitatively
| different from the era of cell, power, MIPS (PS2), and
| worst of all sega saturn. Nobody does the "our console is
| actually eight different processors in a trenchcoat
| segmented in three busses that you have to juggle in
| realtime to keep everything fed" anymore like the sega
| saturn or cell. And no that's not an exaggeration Saturn
| had eight different processors that all needed to be
| juggled... two cpus, a sound controller, a sound
| processor, two video display processors, a coprocessor
| dedicated to managing loads off the cd-rom, and a system
| controller, all with different capabilities and bus
| access. Same for cell with its weird-ass processing
| element model with a ring and no access to system memory,
| etc. Those are far far different from the way x86 chips
| (even semi-custom APUs with different buses etc) are
| designed and the cognitive load was huge for developers.
|
| Microsoft was ahead of the curve in the sense xbox was a
| semi-custom intel processor and an nvidia gpu, and xbox
| 360 was a semi-custom power processor and an ATI GPU, but
| Sony kept at it far too long. They bet everything on
| cell, the original idea was that cell could also be a gpu
| on the same chip but it performed so badly they had to
| add a commodity GPU at the last minute to try and fix it,
| but that left them with a cpu with a super-weird
| programming model and completely undocumented opaque
| hardware that was a nightmare even to bring up a hello
| world application on. Then they went "never again" and
| went commodity x86 SOC with everything integrated,
| alongside microsoft. That brought costs down a ton and
| fully aligned them with what was happening in the PC
| space.
|
| The overall trend was clearly from the arcade/sega saturn
| era of highly custom, arcane architectures with lots of
| individual weird chips towards "CPU+GPU" arrangements and
| then finally just integrated APUs. And that's also the
| exact same time when they stopped selling things at a
| loss - the move towards integrated, semi-custom commodity
| architectures was a major part of that. Xbox One and PS4
| and their refresh consoles and pro versions both moved
| into hardware profitability very quickly.
|
| Also, both of your examples of profitable custom hardware
| were nintendo and they have always been notorious for
| going really cheap on their hardware. The few times they
| haven't, they've gotten burned.
| smoldesu wrote:
| This is largely not true these days. The Switch sold at a
| loss at-launch, but slowly turned a tiny profit as shipping
| prices went down. The modern revisions (Switch Mini and OLED)
| are also priced similarly, so any profits they're making off
| the hardware itself is incredibly marginal.
| vel0city wrote:
| When it comes to network subscriptions, at the time of this
| article Playstation's online services were pretty much all
| free. It was one of the differentiators compared to Xbox's
| paid online services at the time.
|
| That said though, the original PS3 hardware was definitely
| sold at a negative margin and wouldn't be profitable until
| four years into the console's life.
|
| Article from 2010 talking about how the PS3 hardware had only
| just become profitable:
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/512740/article-4244.html
|
| The console released in 2006.
| chomp wrote:
| This is my understanding as well. A big part of this was the
| HD-DVD v Bluray war around that time - Sony winning with
| Bluray would be worth millions of dollars more, so they were
| willing to take a loss to get a Bluray player in each
| person's home.
| cestith wrote:
| I bought my first XBox because the XBox One Series S was at
| one time one of the very best 4k Blu-ray players on the
| market at any price and also one of the less expensive
| ones. The fact it could also play games was merely a bonus
| to me at the time.
| riskneutral wrote:
| Sony subsidizes the cost of the hardware, in order to sell
| games. They were not happy with the Airforce doing this and it
| probably played a role in Sony pushing out an update that
| disabled Linux on all PS3s.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It's a shame they couldn't make it work out anyway. If the
| cost really was 5%-10% of a similar off-the-shelf cluster,
| even without the subsidy it would be, what, 10%-20%? That
| still seems like a steal.
|
| And Sony gets to sell their gaming console as "US Airforce
| proven" or "a supercomputer in a box" or whatever marketing
| spin they want to put on it.
|
| _And_ it is only a couple thousand PS3s anyway, so it is a
| drop in the bucket.
|
| I wonder if there was some behind the scenes stuff going on,
| maybe IBM worried or angry that this would devalue Cell
| processors somehow.
| monocasa wrote:
| They were very happy about the air force doing this.
|
| The whole point of OtherOS (and the official Linux port to
| the PS2 before this
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2 ) was
| to get the system classified as a general purpose computer
| rather than as a game console because that gave them import
| tax benefits in quite a few jurisdictions.
| dntrkv wrote:
| You think Sony didn't know the Airforce was doing this? It's
| not like they walked into Walmart and purchased 1,760 PS3s.
| It had to have been a direct purchase from Sony.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Walmart certainly had 1,760+ PS3s in their warehouses at
| one point. So the Air Force could have just direct
| purchased from Walmart (or Target, etc.) if Sony didn't
| want to sell to them.
|
| 2010: 2882 US Super Centers + 608 Sam's Club + 1578 Mexico
| stores + 321 Canada stores = 5389 stores
|
| People underappreciated the scale of big box national
| retail. ;)
|
| https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2010/11/03/walmart-
| st...
| solarkraft wrote:
| Almost 90 million PS3s have been sold, so it seems entirely
| plausible that they could have directly bought 2000 of them
| through some distributor. Doesn't the military industrial
| complex _prefer_ to go through its inner circle of buddies
| anyway?
| na85 wrote:
| Having worked briefly in military procurement, I can tell
| you the system is set up in a very bureaucratic way.
|
| Certainly there are companies that the military wants to
| buy from. For all the shit about the F-35, Lockheed
| Martin probably employs some of the greatest engineering
| teams on the planet.
|
| The C-130, for example, is probably one of if not the
| greatest aircraft ever designed.
|
| Anyways, there are certain companies that make things
| militaries want to buy, but for more mundane things like
| computers and pens and chairs, either there's a
| negotiated standing offer that legally has to be the
| first point of procurement, or it goes out to contracts.
| Unfortunately winning government contracts is a bit of a
| skill in and of itself and some firms have that skill and
| others don't.
| kube-system wrote:
| > The C-130, for example, is probably one of if not the
| greatest aircraft ever designed.
|
| I don't think I've ever read that before, do you know of
| anywhere I can read more about why that is?
| na85 wrote:
| I'm sure if you google around you'll find some articles
| but, from my perspective as an aerospace engineer who
| used to work on C-130s: It's an absolute workhorse.
|
| If you've ever been up close to a museum fighter plane,
| they're in good shape. The leading edges are all smooth
| and polished, everything is sleek and in good condition.
| Line Hercs are not that. They're usually dented and
| covered in carbon from the exhausts. The leading edge of
| the wing is like three feet thick. It's a Mack truck with
| wings held aloft by furious amounts of horsepower.
|
| It's dependable, reliable, and versatile. These things
| survive being shot at, being landed on gravel, ingesting
| birds into the intakes, ingesting sand into the intakes.
| You can start a Herc by putting another Herc in front of
| it and running the engines up so that the prop wash
| buddy-starts the aircraft behind, like bump-starting a
| car rolling downhill.
|
| There are dozens of variants from the gunships to the
| EC-130 Compass Call and friends which carry serious
| business ELINT gear for secret squirrels to do secret
| squirrel shit with. You can put RATO pods on it. You can
| use it for SAR. You can drop bombs from it (and not even
| by throwing them out the ramp, which you could also do).
| You can use it to refuel fighters and helicopters
| aerially. You can put skis on it and land it in the show.
| You can parachute from it. It's not a jet, but despite
| being a draggy brick of an aircraft it'll still pull
| almost 0.6 of Mach while carrying two hummvees. Also,
| those hummvees can parachute from the aircraft.
|
| There's a reason it's so widely-used [0] and that reason
| is because the Herc is groovy. It's the unsung hero of
| nearly every military operation carried out by NATO and
| friends since the 1960s.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Lockheed_C-130_
| Hercule...
| jjk166 wrote:
| > For all the shit about the F-35
|
| > The C-130, for example, is probably one of if not the
| greatest aircraft ever designed.
|
| One of the benefits of not being a "sexy" project is that
| you don't have everyone and their mother trying to be
| part of the design process. You can tell the team that
| designed the C-130 was given two numbers: range and
| payload, and every other aspect of the design was
| determined by the engineers.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The Air Force maintains many recreational centers. I have a
| buddy that ran these for the Navy. Lots of game consoles,
| etc. I'm sure they could have explained the purchase that
| way.
| prirun wrote:
| The article states that Sony disabled OtherOS before the
| USAF got their cluster built, and Sony was recalling and
| warehousing the PS3s that had the OtherOS feature. The USAF
| had to negotiate with Sony to acquire these older PS3s that
| still had OtherOS capabilities.
| giobox wrote:
| The death of otherOS was entirely to do with the fact it
| facilitated a lot of the reverse engineering efforts on the
| PS3, nothing else. As others correctly note, this was largely
| in response to George Hotz's hacking which required otherOS.
| Sony actually exposed themselves to legal action in many
| countries by selling a customer a product with an advertised
| feature then removing it after the fact, as such behaviour
| can often fall foul of sale of goods legislation.
|
| Sony absolutely adored that supercomputer project if you
| lived through this period and followed the company; the idea
| that the cell processor was a supercomputer for the living
| room and we'd all be using our PS3s for media editing etc was
| genuinely a thought Sony had back then. It all fed into much
| of the (at times ridiculous) marketing for the Cell chip.
| Sony had plans for more Cell based devices that never
| materialized too.
|
| > https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-gives-glimpse-of-
| ps3-...
|
| "First, the company will manufacture a high-end workstation
| using the Cell CPU. Planned for release at the end of 2004...
| the Cell workstations will be marketed directly to the game
| and special-effects industries. The labor in their creation
| will be divided between Sony and IBM. SCE will develop
| middleware and other tools for game development and film
| effects. The Cell chips themselves will be manufactured by
| IBM, who will also work on the OS."
| flutas wrote:
| > it probably played a role in Sony pushing out an update
| that disabled Linux on all PS3s
|
| Pretty sure that was due to it being used to hack the PS3.
|
| > Blame for the latest culling has been pinned on computer
| hacker George Hotz, who was originally infamous for unlocking
| Apple's iPhone. In January of this year Hotz claimed that he
| had successfully hacked Sony's PS3 by exploiting Linux,
| gaining "read/write access to the entire system memory, and
| HV [hyper-visor] level access to the processor".
|
| > Hotz released this to the public on 26 January, boasting,
| "Sony may have difficulty patching the exploit". He may well
| have been right, since Sony's latest response has been to
| completely lock off the required 'Install Other OS' feature.
| Shame on pirates, shame on Sony.
| zappo2938 wrote:
| Navy submarines use XBox controllers to control parascopes.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Also used to control drones and robots in other branches of
| the armed forces.
| tcptomato wrote:
| periscopes ...
| selectodude wrote:
| The USAF uses them for Predator drone flying as well.
|
| I'm not really a pacifist but there is something profoundly
| unsettling about real-life Call of Duty.
| skyyler wrote:
| Before this, the M67 grenade was designed to be familiar to
| soldiers that grew up throwing around baseballs.
|
| I find that incredibly similar to this.
| jjk166 wrote:
| More likely game controllers over the past few decades
| have evolved to be really optimized for controlling the
| position and orientation of an entity in 3D space which
| happens to be the same problem for characters in
| videogames and many objects in the real world, and their
| ubiquity makes them both cheap and easy to integrate.
| masklinn wrote:
| Sony sold the consoles at a loss, and likely had the CPUs for
| much cheaper owing to having bankrolled the chip itself.
| Scuds wrote:
| UGH! All this infrastructure and all this work into a software
| platform and it's something that will be obsoleted in a few years
| by off the shelf GPUs built on an standard development
| environment backed by industry
|
| That's the problem of building something super-cutting-edge on a
| grand scale - you run the risk of making a super evolved version
| of an evolutionary dead end.
|
| Sure it sounds like a cool idea at the time, the Cell optimized
| SETI At Home demo around the PS3 launch ripped through work units
| far more quickly than any Intel system.
|
| I wonder what became of the cluster once it was decommissioned?
| Military surplus PS3s anyone?
| avian wrote:
| > I wonder what became of the cluster once it was
| decommissioned? Military surplus PS3s anyone?
|
| If it touched at any time any kind of confidential data or
| algorithms it was probably shredded into tiny pieces.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Many such cases in high performance computing.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Huh I wonder if that's where Jonathan Nolan got the idea from for
| his show Person of Interest.
| kitplummer wrote:
| I worked on a DARPA project a few years before this - where we
| were using CBE as the core for a polymorphic processor (one with
| an FPGA attached to every IO). We were also gutting PS3s to make
| mission computers for early unmanned systems - running Ubuntu on
| top. USAF wasn't the only one - not only were there commercial
| supply challenges with the PS3, various components were being
| horded by various nation states. We were pretty sure they didn't
| even no what to do with the parts, but was a basic attempt to
| prevent projects like this from getting off the ground.
| kitplummer wrote:
| Another interesting aspect of the PS3 is it was one of the
| first OTS device platforms that integrated hardware DRM.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This used to be fairly common, I think.
|
| I remember in college we had a lab full of PS3s because they were
| cheap and powerful and there was a course you could take to learn
| to develop on them. The lab later expanded after a big donation
| from nvidia of high end gaming machines to teach students CUDA.
|
| The courses sucked though, because everyone would take them just
| to get access to the labs.
| system16 wrote:
| > that cost is about 5-10% of the cost of an equivalent system
|
| I bet 1,760 chickens cost roughly 5-10% of the cost of a
| Clydesdale, but I know which one I'd prefer to pull a cart.
| humanistbot wrote:
| Literally every single "supercomputer" is a distributed cluster
| like this.
| [deleted]
| Communitivity wrote:
| I was there, but not on that project. It worked well. The reasons
| it was attractive were the cost savings, but more importantly the
| unique aspects of the Cell processor in the PS3s.
| danso wrote:
| What's the best lengthy write-up of the Air Force's PS3 cluster
| (if any exist)? From the headlines, I had always thought it to
| be some marketing gimmick.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Why is that? What was it about the Cell processor at the time
| that was desirable?
|
| Afaik PS3s were sold at a loss for Sony, so it seems likely
| that they were very beefy computationally wise, but I am use
| USAF could have gotten an incredible deal with Intel, IBM or
| AMD, so what is it?
| dc-programmer wrote:
| The most surprising aspect of this story to me is that the Air
| Force was allowed to exercise this level of resourcefulness. I
| just assumed that the procurement process would stipulate 10 year
| support contracts or something similar.
| tomrod wrote:
| There is a lot of innovation in the contracting/procurement
| space with Government. As an example, check out AFWERX.
| fdr wrote:
| me too. Large, even medium-large private bureaucracies may have
| also made it a challenge.
| smallmouth wrote:
| Most would be quite surprised by how resourceful the military
| can get when a need arises. It's simultaneously impressive and
| scary.
| bitwize wrote:
| If some officer can cobble together a proof of concept from
| COTS parts and show that it is just as reliable and effective
| as the boutique stuff from Raytheon, et al., at a way cheaper
| price, you bet that it will be met with considerable attention
| if not approval. Most ground-based military drones these days
| are controlled with Xbox controllers because those controllers
| are cheap and ubiquitous. In the 90s, Doom (with mods) was
| pressed into service as a simulator to help teach Marines
| fireteam tactics.
|
| About the most stiff-necked branch of the U.S. military is the
| Navy. I'd be more surprised if the Navy approved a PS3
| supercomputer, especially if it were to be run aboard ship.
| blueboo wrote:
| Is there any evidence of the resulting "supercomputer" being
| used? It's one thing to buy two thousand PS3s. Another to deploy
| them into a data center. And yet another to build processes and
| software that uses it. The challenges involved seem discouraging.
| thetinguy wrote:
| It wasn't just the air force.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
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