UPDATE: The director of the Defense Department laboratory that developed the Condor supercomputer, using Sony PlayStation consoles, talked with The Plain Dealer this morning. See the story here.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- What do you get when you string 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 video gaming consoles together?

You get the Condor Cluster -- the biggest, fastest interactive computer the Defense Department has, according to the Air Force. After its formal unveiling this week, it can be used to solve image-matching problems and assist in surveillance situations, using radar enhancement and pattern recognition capabilities.

What, you were expecting a Grand Theft Auto or Pac-Man Championship Edition marathon?

Researchers under the command of Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton have harnessed massive computing power with off-the-shelf PlayStation 3 consoles, or PS3s, linked to more traditional graphical processing computer components. They'll cut the ribbon on the Condor on Wednesday, in a ceremony at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., where work on the computer was conducted.

Total cost is about $2 million. That's ten to 20 times cheaper that what traditional computing equipment might cost, according to a posting on Wright Patterson's public affairs website.

Officials directly involved in the project were not available for interviews Monday. But an Air Force public affairs officer pointed out an article in Stars and Stripes, a newspaper that covers the military, that said earlier this year that the Sony consoles will create a supercomputer nearly 100,000 times faster than high-end computer processors sold today.

To lay people and even ordinary video gamers, the harnessing of video gaming technology for super computing may seem unusual. But "unusual is a relative term," said Larry Merkle, assistant chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University.

Video game consoles were developed with cutting-edge graphics capabilities, able to handle extensive numerical computations, Merkle said. That makes them well suited for certain tasks.

According to Airman Magazine Online, the use of PS3s with other aerial surveillance technology will enable scientists to monitor a 25-kilometer area (roughly 16 miles) in real time.

This does not mean that if everyone on your block buys a PS3 for Christmas, you'll be able to create a block-wide supercomputer.

"You would need some basic networking hardware and the know-how to put the networking hardware together," Merkle explained. You'd also need to know how to partition the problem you're trying to solve, breaking it down so the multiple computations could be handled separately and then linked together.

"Certainly your average home does not have these networks based on PS3s," Merkle said.

In other words, go ahead and buy a PS3 -- if you want to play Gran Turismo 5, Madden NFL 11 and other games. Leave the computing to the Pentagon.