US Department of Defense engineers and Sony built the most powerful computer in the Department’s inventory by linking 1,760 PlayStation 3 gaming consoles:

The supercomputer, nicknamed the Condor Cluster, will allow very fast analysis of large high-resolution imagery — billions of pixels a minute, taking what used to take several hours down to mere seconds, Barnell said.

Its sophisticated algorithms also will allow scientists to better identify objects flying in space, where movement and distance create blurring, with higher-quality images than possible before.

Its capacity makes the PlayStation 3 cluster about the 33rd largest computer in the world, Barnell said. “It’s in that magnitude. ”

The supercomputer is currently housed at the US Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York.

Link via Geekosystem | Photo: US Department of Defense

According to Nvidia, a technology company that supplied parts for the Chinese computer, the Tianhe-1A was clocked at 2.507 petaflops, or more than two quadrillion calculations per second. It has the power of 175,000 high-end laptops.[...]

Until now, the fastest supercomputer was the Jaguar, built by Cray, and installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Jaguar has clocked 1.75 petaflops in testing.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: NVIDIA

Dark Roasted Blend, one of my favorite blogs which sucks at least 30 minutes of my free time whenever I visit, has a really neat post about real and imaginary supercomputers. This one above is the Z1 computer, built by German engineer Konrad Zuse, who built the world’s first programmable computer.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: The Wonderful World of Early Computing

It’s called “MareNostrum” and it is currently the largest supercomputer in Europe and the 9th largest in the world.

Link – via Digg