Copied here is an impressive chart on the projected growth of HPC computational requirements in the global defense industry.  It looks like about an order of magnitude increase in demand for HPC cycles in the next three years; that’s definitely ahead of Moore’s Law.  Makes me wonder what the forecast is for Canada, I have been searching for data on HPC use in the Canadian forces, but haven’t found very much.

The point of the article is the emphasis on use of commodity Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components, to assemble large scale systems that are application specific – ie. the system is carefully tuned for one specific parallel program.  What is really interesting is the price/performance argument made for building an HPC cluster from Sony Playstations.  The cell processor in the PS3 is a very powerful compute engine, much more powerful that the AMD|Intel chip in your laptop.  Because of the manufacturing volume of the games market, you get a very high performance compute node for the fraction of the price of an equivalent performance compute server; and they don’t even need the bluray drive or hard drive, which would make the unit more energy efficient, less noisy and even cheaper.  That reminds me, the PS3 I bought the boys is really noisy, you’d think Sony could have done a better job with that; conductive cooling and a solid state drive would have been really cool (which by the way is also a requirement for military embedded systems).

Curious then that IBM has announced that there will be no further development of this amazing processor chip.  Curious as well that the machine we buy our kids to simulate war games, when configured as an HPC compute cluster, is a powerful tool to manage the real thing.