TIL: PS3 clusters were used as cost-effective supercomputer networks

We’ve seen the capabilities of newer PlayStations in the last decade or so, only really being surpassed by PCs. But did you know that PlayStation 3’s were capable of high performance computing and they were cheaper than traditional supercomputers?

In the mid-to-late 00s, various governmental and academic departments deployed PS3 clusters to aid them with their research due to their-powerful IBM Cell CPUs:

• In 2006, US scientists planned to build a cluster of idle PS3’s in people’s homes to tackle and help understand diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer. The program was known as Folding@home and expanded in 2007, lasting a number of years.
• In 2007, a physics professor from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth named Gaurav Khanna built his own cluster out of eight PS3s called the PS3 Gravity Grid. The cluster helped to estimate properties of the gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes and gained a lot of buzz.
• In 2010, the Air Force Research Laboratory created a cluster known as the “Condor cluster” using 1,760 consoles. The cluster was capable of 500 TFLOPS (that’s 500 trillion floating-point operations per second). At the time it was the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world and analysed images from space at a fraction of the cost of a regular supercomputer.

Sadly, Sony released an update in 2010 that disabled the ability to install another OS onto a PS3, due to security concerns. While this didn’t effect existing clusters, it meant updated PS3 were done for and interest died down as newer technologies came through. Cell CPUs had also reached the end of the line in 2009, according to IBM’s then-VP of Deep Computing, David Turek. While people thought this could have opened the door for a future PS4 collaboration as IBM improved their chips, that never came to be as Sony opted for an AMD APU instead. The reason? Cell CPUs were too complex. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted!