Why defense spending needs to be cut this year

No doubt the Air Force purchasing department gets some odd requests from time to time, but we'd love to have seen the grin on the face of the officer tasked with procuring some 1,700 Playstation 3s for a USAF facility in Rome, NY.

Before you complain about your tax dollars being spent on toys, the machines aren't for gaming. Instead, the facility -- an Air Force research lab -- will join them into a parallel-computing cluster that, when complete, will number well over 2,000 PS3s.

The supercomputer -- snappily monikered "500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster" -- will be put to work playing 2,000 simultaneous games of God of War III. Wait, no. Among other things, they'll be attempting to simulate the way the human brain processes information and how it pulls off the remarkably difficult task of recognizing the content of images.

"Humans can routinely do these things, but a computer struggles to do it," the facility's computing director Mark Barnell told Stars and Stripes. "In a general sense, we are interested in making it autonomous."

The cluster won't be as powerful as a regular supercomputing rig, but it will be cheaper and more environmentally friendly: it'll consume as much as 95% less electrical power and shut down unused machines when the cluster isn't running at full capacity.

vampiresoldier said:
Yeah, the AF is getting its PS3 fit.

I mean, fucking seriously? Over 2000 PS3's when complete? Is this why the Air Force gets more funds then any other service? To buy fucking PS3's?

motorfirebox said:
hey, somebody's gotta crack captcha.

vampiresoldier said:
And yes, i did read the article, and you don't need over 2000 PS3 to simulate the human brain, i'm pretty sure there are over 2000 fat air force people that can be hooked up with cables on their head to do the same shit.

When my unit doesn't even have money to send us to train, reading shit like this makes me want to punch every AF asshole i see.

Edited to say: This is the service that just last year was kicking people out because the had way too many personnel and didn't want to pay them, way to go AF.

Coyotemike said:

gdarklighter said:

Out of curiosity, would you have had the same reaction had you read about a 2000 CPU cluster being produced for the Air Force by IBM at a unit cost an order of magnitude more expensive than a PS3?

s5 said:
The government figured out a way to cut costs by buying cheap gaming consoles instead of computers, so we should cut the program and replace it with something more expensive.

vampiresoldier said:
And yes, i did read the article, and you don't need over 2000 PS3 to simulate the human brain, i'm pretty sure there are over 2000 fat air force people that can be hooked up with cables on their head to do the same shit.

When my unit doesn't even have money to send us to train, reading shit like this makes me want to punch every AF asshole i see.

Edited to say: This is the service that just last year was kicking people out because the had way too many personnel and didn't want to pay them, way to go AF.

Is this why the Air Force gets more funds then any other service? To buy fucking PS3's?

Aaron said:
Air Force Budget, 2010 - $160.5 billion

Army Budget, 2010 - $225.2 billion

Navy/Marine Corps Budget, 2010 - $171.7 billion

I hope the DoD does the right thing and starts giving the Army their fair share, it's absolutely egregious that the Air Force would spend $40,000 on equipment for a research and development project.

motorfirebox said:

well, to be accurate, the Air Force has 194k fewer troops than the Army, meaning their budget is $65k more per soldier than the Army's.

Coyotemike said:

But that $65k (and I really don't think it works like that anyway) more per soldier pay for the Air Force to develop the technology that helps protect the members of the other branches? You know, sending in a drone instead of a column of troops; providing satellite recon; sending in guided missiles instead of risking a plane to enemy fire . . . stuff like that?