With a little modification, of course. And a few of its friends. At least, that's what the US
Their project, dubbed the 'Condor Cluster' was built in 2010, following the advent of another supercomputer. Dr. Gaurav Khanna, out of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, set out in 2007 to build a budget super computer. Dr. Khanna is a physicist studying black holes. The computing power needed to do computations for his study of gravitational waves is tremendous. The benefit of using a supercomputer is that they can crunch and calculate numbers ten times bettr than a standard computer. Unfortunately, they are cost prohibitive for the average person to build. Hence the genesis of Dr. Khanna's quest.
His choice for a cost-cutting measure was to use the GPUs and CPUs of several PlayStation 3s. He had several reasons behind the choice, processing power and price tag being among those, but also the ability to install a secondary OS. Dr. Khanna added Linux. He started off with just a few machines, 4 donated by
Word travels fast about innovation, inexpensive innovation at that. Soon enough the DOD heard about Dr. Khanna's project. They decided to build their own computer. With a much bigger budget than a University professor, they were able to cobble together a few more systems for theirs. Eventually, the US Air Force Research Laboratory created the Condor Cluster, a sequence of 1,760 PS3s wired into one massive computer. That computer had a processing power of 500TFLOPS, that's 500 trillion FLoating-point Operations Per Second. At that speed it is the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department. The lab penned a research and development agreement with Dr. Khanna and his team, to collaborate on the Condor Cluster. As a thank you, the Air Force lab donated 176 machines to Dr. Khanna's own project.
With the additional PS3s from the Air Force, his supercomputer had the computational power of 3000 laptops and desktop computers. Not as powerful as the government's project, but more than enough for a college professor looking to understand black holes. That computational power of his setup should already had grown, if not doubled, thanks to an additional donation of 220 machines from the USAF lab. However, here's where the story takes a turn. In March 2010, Sony released an update for all future PS3s that would discontinue the ability to install a secondary OS. This means that only older systems can be used to create a serialized supercomputer.
While the fact that PlayStations can be used for such an unique application is interesting, there's more to be seen. Dr. Khanna's nearly 200 system supercomputer came with an estimated price tag of $75,000, making it one of the cheapest supercomputers ever devised. For a comparison,
While this sounds like a massive gap, its really not. In order to match up toe-to-toe with Titan, Dr. Khanna would have to create 360 additional systems identical to his current computer and string them all together into one massive unit.
Here's something else to think about. It took the government 1760 PS3s to get to the computing power of 500TFLOPS. Each individual PS4 has the theoretical peak computing power of 1.84 TFLOPS already built in. That means that, at the current shelf price of $399, you could build a supercomputer better than the Condor Cluster for around $200,000. If you want to exactly match up in terms of computing power, it will cost you just over $100,000. That's 275 PS4 systems for $109,000 with a theoretical peak computational power of 506 TFLOPS. To get a theoretical peak computing power of 920 TFLOPS which is what will stop the USAF stone cold, it costs $199,500. So, either a 2016 Aston Martin DB9 GT or a supercomputer, both items carry the same price.
Let's take it a step further. A PS4 cluster against Titan. (Insert Attack on Titan joke here) To equal the computing power of Titan, you would have to string together 14,700 PS4s. That gets you to a theoretical peak of 27 PFLOPS. Cost? $5.8M. In January, Floyd Mayweather posted a photo of himself with 8 of his cars and his plane. Total cost of that collection? $5.9M.
Unfortunately, this is all theoretical. After Sony removed the 'Other OS' option from the PS3, they never put it back. It's virtually impossible to install Linux onto the PS4, which means repeating Dr. Khanna's computer with the newest technology is pure conjecture. It's nice to dream about, but until Sony decides otherwise, that's all we have. Dreams. But what grand dreams they are.
