Sony's been bragging for a while now that the PlayStation 3 "only does everything," and now they can add yet another item to the list: neuromorphic computing. According to military news site Stars and Stripes, a U.S. Air Force research facility in Rome, N.Y. plans to link 2,000 of Sony's machines in order to form a bargain-bin supercomputer. Called the 500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster, the massive collection of PS3s will be used to process everything from synthetic-aperture radar images to programs designed to mimic the human mind's ability to recognize pictures.

Dr. Richard Linderman, senior scientist for Advanced Computing Architectures at the Rome facility, explains: "With Neuromorphic Computing, as an example, we will broadcast an image to all PS3s and ask if it matches an image it has in its hard drive."

"Humans can routinely do these things, but a computer struggles to do it," added the lab's high performance computing director Mark Barnell. "In a general sense, we are interested in making it autonomous."

The Air Force researchers opted to use PS3s for their studies because of the console's low price-to-performance ratio, as well as the system's relatively small power consumption rate. The cell processor's ability to easily work in tandem with other cells also played an important part in the researchers' decision.

"Supercomputers used to be unique with unique processors. By taking advantage of a growing market, the gaming market, we are bringing the price performance to just $2 to $3 per gigaFLOPS," Linderman commented.

Source: UGO.com