Motherboard

PHOTO: a dramatization of Air Force personnel lining up at Best Buy; Best Buy employees on learning the news; a possible Playstation 3 supercomputer setup

We already know that we don’t need air force pilots to drop bombs on terrorist dinners anymore, just gamers manning drones. And eventually, gamers flying virtual drones. And eventually robots flying virtual drones in the form of manga characters.

To get there and other places, the Air Force is buying 2,200 PlayStation3s. They’ll use them to build a Linux supercomputer, and not, mind you, to build a massive array of DIY PS3 grilles. (They’re already set with grilles.)

They are not however already set when it comes to PS3 supercomputers. Their current one, made of 336 of the old-style consoles at a cost of $118,000, has already been used for a few applications not currently available on the regular stand-alone, non-supercomputer PS3. Those uses include, says Information Week, “processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and ‘neuromorphic’ computing, or building computers with brain-like properties.”

The Air Force likes the Playstation3 for its Cell Broadband Engine processor architecture, which also powers the world’s second-fastest supercomputer, IBM’s RoadRunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and because multicore Xeon servers are slower (of course) and more expensive than PS3s. To repeat, they are into the PS3 for its hardware, not because its the only system that supports Sing Star: Queen.

For their latest trip to Best Buy, the Air Force has prepared a Justification Review Document (cached version here), which is necessary to prove you’re not putting $600,000 on daddy’s credit card for some kind of clever recruitment drive using a massive NBA Live 10 tournament as bait.

If you happen to have 2,200 brand new PS3s lying around, check out that document and give them a call. (Don’t forget to mention you’re also interested in learning more about this new recruitment drive.)