Four years after Sony unveiled its gaming console to the world, some researchers and federal agencies are using PS3s for serious work.
For the last year, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., has used a bank of 40 interconnected PS3 consoles to decrypt passwords. It's working to add 40 more units.
Through Stanford University's Folding@home project, almost 40,000 PS3s volunteered by their owners during idle time currently contribute to the study of protein folding. More than 880,000 PS3 consoles have participated in the project, researchers said.
The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., uses a cluster of 336 PS3s for research on urban surveillance and large image processing. Last month, the lab ordered 2,200 more units.
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For cash-strapped federal agencies, the balance between performance and price was crucial.
Chris Landi, senior special agent and section chief at ICE's Cyber Crimes Center, said each PlayStation 3 in the center's decryption silo is capable of generating 25,000 passwords per second while a Dell PowerEdge server, several of which are part of the silo, produces 17,000.
"The cost for each Dell server is around $3,500, he said. Landi estimates the cost of the silo - which is used in child exploitation and pornography investigations and is often used by local, state, federal and even foreign agencies - to be around $1 million. The figure for a machine with similar capabilities that didn't use PS3s would be much higher, he said.
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Berkeley's Anderson said newer technologies can now easily outperform the PS3's Cell processor. The Nvidia and ATI graphic processing units, for example, are at least 10 times faster than the Cell processor, he said.
But both Landi and Barnell said they believe the PS3s in their machines will serve them for many years.
"Whatever new equipment we get, we'll just tie it to old equipment. It'll never stop being useful," Landi said.