Why Does the Air Force Want Thousands of PlayStations?

Dec. 8, 2009— -- Guess what's on the U.S. Air Force's wish list this holiday season.

Sony's popular PlayStation 3 gaming console. Thousands of them.

The Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., recently issued a request for proposal indicating its intention to purchase 2,200 PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles.

But the military researchers don't plan to play "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" or any of the season's other blockbuster games. They plan to string the consoles together into a massive supercomputer and study how well they can enhance the military's high-performance computing systems.

"The PS3s offer some outstanding performance for the price," said Richard Linderman, senior scientist for advanced computing architectures at the Air Force Research Laboratory. "It's an opportunity to leverage the large gaming market and get those kinds of cost efficiencies which are more along the lines of high-performance computing."

What makes the PlayStation so interesting to Linderman and his bargain-hunting colleagues is the PS3's mega-powerful Cell processor, which was created jointly by IBM, Sony and Toshiba.

According to a document accompanying the Air Force RFP, a server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8,000, while two Sony PS3s cost just a fraction of that price at about $600.

The two cell processors are about 33 percent more powerful than the PS3s, but the document went on to say that the PS3s are still more cost-effective.