In 1994 Sony made a twist with the original PlayStation. That console managed to shake the foundations of that segment that was dominated by Sega and Nintendo. Its success was immense and the Japanese company quickly got to work on its successor. One thing turned out to be so powerful that it was also dangerous. It was said But sapien 2.
Ken KutaragiThe designer of the original PlayStation began work on its successor in late 1994, shortly after the launch of the PS1. In 1997 there were already rumors about the launch Sony denied it which of course I would deny.
Sony finally announced (but did not release) the PlayStation 2 on March 2, 1999. We first heard two unique words uttered by Kutaragi: “Perfect Engine”. Those words gave the name to the graphics coprocessor that was a fundamental part of the PS2. The legendary manager also confirmed that the console will offer backwards compatibility with the original titles of the site.
On April 20th, 2000, Season 2 went on sale in Japan, and it did so with impressive new features such as your CD drive which favors the moment of formation, but also with questions: the catalog for its launch he was very poor. Not only that: Sony only had a million units, and people they were encamped in the shops for days as one. Availability was an issue for months, but it was a bigger concern.
Web drones in sight
Japanese government found that the PS2 was capable of much more than that. The motion engine had the ability to process three-dimensional images which was prodigious at the time. on the chip is counted with two vector processing units, which used to calculate the positions of some elements in physical space, very useful things for video game designs.
However, it also had potential military applications: it could be used, for example, to control missile systems.
Japan has already had problems with military applications of technology intended for this region.
In 1998 by a North Korean submarine slipped and it was discovered that among its parts were Japanese systems and the Japanese government He did not want to expose himself to that risk. What did he do? Your Ministry of Commerce forced to allow special export for the PS2: who would like to buy the console in Japan I will take her to another countrythey had to obtain a special license from the government, which considered that the PS2 technology could be used for military purposes.
Sony was in charge of an agreement with their government to be able to export their consoles to the rest of the world, but many countries banned it: Libya, Iran, Iraq and North Korea could not buy the console.
Some even overcame the intervention: the FBI ended up investigating let there be 4,000 PS2 in Iraq. They were afraid to comfort them, or to be a part of their use to create supercomputers for the purposes. They pointed to Saddam Hussein some mediayou can think about using PS2 to conquer the world. Or maybe they didn’t sign up after that.
Intelligence sources are really concerned and He did not tell “the applications of this system are powerfully intimidating” and one expert estimated that a combination of 12 or 15 PS2s could provide “enough computing power to control Iraq UAVaircraft without a pilot. “Or, which is the same thing, a drone, a concept by that name that was not even heard of in the year 2000.
In addition, supercomputers from the PS2 can process ballistic data for long-range missiles, or to design nuclear weapons, these intelligence sources said. Although the United Nations banned the sale of the technology to Iraq, the solar video game was not included in it.
A supercomputer made from a PS2 file (but not from a PS3).
The fear of building a supercomputer from the combination of several PS2s became a reality shortly after. In 2002 Sony a linux kit for the PlayStation 2, and thanks to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) of the United States. They thought up the project for* I create a supercomputer based on the PS2.
engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign They came together in a cluster to carry between 60 and 70 PS2″ and a total of about $50,000. They mounted them on a rack specially designed for consoles and connected them to an HP processor to investigate possible applications in this area of supercomputing.
The system was used to perform quantum chromodynamic calculations, but the NCSA authors themselves confirmed that the useful life of that system was reduced and “it was always more of an experiment of what could be done than an attempt to complete the system… for production.
In fact, it is necessary to leave that test mark, because Sony launched with the PS3United States Army bought 1,760 consoles forced and (along with 168 GPUs) to implement supercomputing for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
The Condor cluster, once one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Source: Phys.org.
That cluster, which they named Condor, combined the processing power of those 1,760 Cells—another marvel of the time—and became the most powerful computer in the Department of Defense at the time.
At the time, Condor had a computing power of 500 TFLOPS, and was ranked among the 33 most powerful supercomputers in the world. The cost is close to two million dollars, 5-10% of the cost of someone who had built it with traditional parts, the AFRL stated.
It was not only powerful: it was super efficient, consuming 10% of the power of comparable supercomputers. The Department of Defense has used it, among other things, to analyze high-definition satellite images. What we never knew was if Iraq ended up using some of those PS2s military purpose. Perhaps they are only used for what they were created for: gaming.
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* A previous version of this article was published in December 2022
