If you’ve been following what the United States Air Force does with our money, you’d know that they originally bought about 300 PS3s in 2008. They liked them so much that they bought 2,200 more last year. The USAF made some supercomputer with the systems, grouping these 2,200 systems with the 336 ones they already had from 2008 to make one massive research machine. And gaming rig?
You surely heard that Sony’s firmware update will toss out the Other OS install option of the PS3. What does that mean for the USAF’s rig? Well, they don’t have to update the software, as they’re not really gaming on the PlayStation Netowrk on these. What sucks is that if one of their PS3s dies, they’ll have to buy a new one, and that new one will have the firmware update.
“We will have to continue to use the systems we already have in hand,” the USAF research lab told Ars Technica, and “this will make it difficult to replace systems that break or fail. The refurbished PS3s also have the problem that when they come back from Sony, they have the firmware (gameOS) and it will not allow Other OS, which seems wrong. We are aware of class-action lawsuits against Sony for taking away this option on systems that use to have it.”
So why use game systems when there’s this risk? For you, dear taxpayer: “The HPC environment is rapidly changing; leveraging technology that is subsidized by large consumer markets will always have large cost advantages. This gives us the experience (lesson learned) to develop HPC with low-cost hardware, benefitting the tax payer, Air Force, Air Force Research Lab while utilizing limited DoD budgets.”
Air Force may suffer collateral damage from PS3 firmware update [Ars]
