In 1994 Sony made a splash with the original PlayStation. That console managed to shake the foundations of that segment dominated by Sega and Nintendo. Its success was enormous and the Japanese company quickly got to work on its successor. One that turned out to be so powerful that it was even dangerous. It was called PlayStation 2.
Ken Kutaragi, the designer of the original PlayStation, began working on its successor in late 1994, shortly after the launch of the PS1. In 1997 there were already rumors of its launch although Sony denied it because of course, I had to deny it.
Sony finally announced (but did not release) the PlayStation 2 on March 2, 1999. It was the first time we heard two singular words, which were uttered by Kutaragi: “Emotion Engine.” Those words gave name to the graphics coprocessor that was a fundamental part of the PS2. The legendary manager also confirmed that the console would offer backward compatibility with the original PlayStation titles.
On March 4, 2000, the PlayStation 2 went on sale in Japan, and it did so with overwhelming new features such as your DVD drive —which favored the momentum of the format—, but also with problems: the catalog at its launch was very poor. Not only that: Sony only had a million units available, and people camped out in stores for days to get their hands on one. Availability was an issue for months, but there was an even bigger concern.
Missiles and drones in sight
The Japanese government discovered that the PS2 could be much more than a toy. Emotion Engine had a capacity to process three-dimensional images that was prodigious for the time. The chip had two vector processing units that were used to calculate positions of certain elements in physical space, something very useful for video game designers.
However, it also had potential military applications: it could be used, for example, for missile guidance systems.
Japan had already had problems with military applications of technology designed in this country.
In 1998, a North Korean submarine sank and it was discovered that its components included Japanese radar systems, and the Japanese government did not want to expose itself to that risk. What did he do? Its Ministry of Commerce forced a special export permit for the PS2: those who wanted to Buy the console in Japan and take it to another countrythey had to obtain that special permission from the government, which considered that the PS2 technology could be used for military purposes.
Sony was in charge of reaching an agreement with its government to be able to export its consoles to the rest of the world, but several countries were banned: Libya, Iran, Iraq and North Korea could not buy the console.
Even so, some overrode the veto: the FBI ended up investigating the shipment of 4,000 PS2 to Iraq. They feared that those consoles—or part of them—would end up being used for create a supercomputer for military purposes. Saddam Hussein, some media pointed out, could be thinking about using the PS2 to conquer the world. Or maybe not, they subtitled later.
Intelligence sources were genuinely concerned, stating that “the applications for this system are potentially terrifying,” and one expert estimated that combining 12 or 15 PS2s could provide “enough computing power to control an Iraqi UAVan aircraft without a pilot.” Or what is the same, a drone, a concept that in the year 2000 was not even heard of by that name.
In addition, these supercomputers made up of PS2 could be used to calculate ballistic data for long-range missiles, or to design nuclear weapons, these intelligence sources stated. Although the United Nations prohibited the sale of technology to Iraq, video game consoles were not included in that veto.
The supercomputer made of PS2 was a fiasco (but not the one made of PS3)
Fears of building a supercomputer based on the combination of several PS2s became reality shortly after. In 2002 Sony launched a Linux kit for the PlayStation 2, and thanks to that offer the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) devised a project to create a supercomputer based on the PS2.
Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign They assembled a cluster with between 60 and 70 PS2 and a total cost of about $50,000. They mounted them in a rack specially designed for the console and connected them with an HP switch to investigate possible applications in this area of supercomputing.
The system was used to perform calculations in the field of quantum chromodynamics, but those responsible for the NCSA themselves confirmed that the useful life of that system was reduced and “it was always more a test of what was possible than an attempt to create a system.” of production”.
In fact, that experiment must have left a mark, because when Sony launched the PS3the United States Army purchased 1,760 consoles to combine them and (along with 168 GPUs) create a supercomputer 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 power of those 1,760 Cell processors—another prodigy of the time—and became the most powerful computer in the US Department of Defense at that time.
At that time Condor had a computing power of 500 TFLOPS, and was ranked 33rd among the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The cost was close to two million dollars, 5-10% of the cost that would have entailed building it with traditional components, they stated in the AFRL.
It was not only powerful: it was super efficient, consuming 10% of comparable supercomputers in power. The Department of Defense used it, among other things, for the analysis of high-definition satellite images. What we never knew is if Iraq ended up using those PS2s for some military purpose. Maybe they only ended up using them for what they were created for: playing.
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*An earlier version of this article was published in December 2022
