113w ago - Consisting of 1,716 PlayStation 3 consoles linked together and utilizing OtherOS, the Rome Research Lab has announced the completion of their new PS3 Condor Supercomputer, which is now fully online and claimed to be in the top 40 most powerful supercomputers.

Currently it is being loaned out to universities so they can crunch slightly less dangerous data, and the system is also intended to provide analysts with new levels of detail from pictures gathered from spy planes.

The Condor will enable 24-hour real-time surveillance of a roughly 15 mile-wide area, allowing video processed from radar signals to be viewed in real-time or played back.

Such a system can help to investigate the moments before an event such as an explosion or an ambush on military units. It is part of military developments aiming to achieve constant and detailed surveillance over a wide area.

To quote from HotHardware.com (linked above): With 7 SPE's per PS3 (the eighth is deactivated), the 1,716 systems offer a total of 12,012 processors.

The Condor is, according to the Air Force, one of the forty fastest computers in the world and will hopefully solve a pervasive problem for the modern military. Up until the last sixty years, the various branches of the military all suffered from a...