Things to do with 13,000 Playstation 3's....

....why, build a supercomputer of course. Those clever IBM people have built a record breaking one for Los Alamos military labs, it does 1 quadrillion flops - as seen in the NYT.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

Interesting comment :

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

In all seriousness, if one looks at processing speeds etc, just chaining 8 or so PS3s together would give the average home hobbyist the processing power of a small supercomputer of 10 years ago.

What, one wonders, can the average home do with even such a mini-supercomputer? Its quite interesting just to sit back and think about that sort of power if it were taken for granted that every home had it. Who needs a Grid? Actually, speaking of Grids, another supercomputer is growing organically via Folding@Home project - the Folding@home supercomputer currently operates at 1048 teraFLOPs, 772 teraFLOPS comes from the PlayStation 3.

Hmmm...can I fit 13,000 of the little buggers in the cellar ?