USAF casualty of collateral damage in Sony update

Coriolanus

Got a bit of a giggle out of this.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/05/how-removing-ps3-linux-hurts-the-air-force.ars

This alone is worth a look. A processing cluster made up of 336 PS3's, they later went on to build a 1700 unit cluster. :eek: Apparently it was cheaper to buy PS3's than buy the necessary chips alone.

Gunmonkey

It was all a big ploy by Sony to weaken Americas airforce in time for Pearl Harbour 2: Fire on the Water.........

Antar Bolaeisk

They knew this was coming so I'd be very surprised if someone hasn't been working on a way to perform a firmware download either through fake servers or, if it's an options, flashing the chip themselves to restore the old firmware.

Of course, if Sony were wise they'd offer the option to buy PS3s with the old firmware at double the rrp to these groups.

Overheal

Sony's decision had no immediate impact on the cluster; for obvious reasons, the PS3s are not hooked into the PlayStation Network and don't need Sony's firmware updates. But what happens when a PS3 dies or needs repair? Tough luck.

We checked in with the Air Force Research Laboratory, which noted its disappointment with the Sony decision. "We will have to continue to use the systems we already have in hand," the lab told Ars, but "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."

A similar issue will confront academic PS3 clusters, which have sprung up in labs across the country. In 2007, a North Carolina State professor built himself a small cluster that he cobbled together after "he spent a few hours one day in early January driving from store to store to purchase the eight machines."

The University of Massachusetts has 16 machines networked into a cluster called the "Gravity Grid," used to look at gravitational waves and black holes. According to the physicists at UMass, the PS3's "incredibly low cost make it very attractive as a scientific computing node, i.e., part of a compute cluster. In fact, it's highly plausible that the raw computing power-per-dollar that the PS3 offers is significantly higher than anything else on the market today."

All such projects will last as long as the machines survive or used machines are still available, but new hardware can't be added and refurbished machines can't be used. A class-action lawsuit has recently targeted Sony for removing a promised feature retroactively, though the issue is unlikely to be decided anytime soon.

We asked Sony for comment on how its decision would affect scientific computing clusters, but received no answer before publication.

Fascinating stuff o_O

Antar wrote:

if Sony were wise they'd offer the option to buy PS3s with the old firmware at double the rrp to these groups.

That would make them worthless still. Its the PS3's cost : performance ratio, scalability and previously open-source capabilities that made them an attractive piece of node hardware. Such is no longer the case. Nor would it be if the cost per unit suddenly doubled.

eddhorse

Great find and good reading, you should put a link in the Playstation forum too !

Coriolanus

eddhorse wrote: »

Great find and good reading, you should put a link in the Playstation forum too !

Ars Technica is great. A lot of the stuff goes whoosh over my head but I'm learning!

weiland79

1700 Dual Shock3 controllers at $17.95 on Ebay = $30.515.

They'll probably incinerate them!:eek:

Overheal

weiland79 wrote: »

1700 Dual Shock3 controllers at $17.95 on Ebay = $30.515.

They'll probably incinerate them!:eek:

lol, hell no. They probably didnt even get the controllers. It was a specialty commercial bid. and if they did they would have been sold to drive down the cost of the cluster.

eddhorse

I never thought of that , waste of controllers

Proprietary software no longer supported. Mmhmm.

Retr0gamer

What happens when they all YLOD???

Antar Bolaeisk

Overheal wrote: »

That would make them worthless still. Its the PS3's cost : performance ratio, scalability and previously open-source capabilities that made them an attractive piece of node hardware. Such is no longer the case. Nor would it be if the cost per unit suddenly doubled.

I was thinking more along the lines of replacements when the PS3s inevitably explode.

I'm sure if they priced the consoles properly they could still prove to be very attractive for large scale computing so as this but then they probably want to sell the cell as a separate entity with all the associated hardware to groups who want such a setup.