The Rise and Fall of the PlayStation Supercomputers

'"On the 25th anniversary of the original Sony PlayStation, The Verge
shares the story of the PlayStation supercomputers," writes Slashdot
reader jimminy_cricket. From the report:

Dozens of PlayStation 3s sit in a refrigerated shipping container on
the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's campus, sucking up energy
and investigating astrophysics. It's a popular stop for tours trying
to sell the school to prospective first-year students and their
parents, and it's one of the few living legacies of a weird science
chapter in PlayStation's history. Those squat boxes, hulking on
entertainment systems or dust-covered in the back of a closet, were
once coveted by researchers who used the consoles to build
supercomputers. With the racks of machines, the scientists were
suddenly capable of contemplating the physics of black holes,
processing drone footage, or winning cryptography contests. It only
lasted a few years before tech moved on, becoming smaller and more
efficient. But for that short moment, some of the most powerful
computers in the world could be hacked together with code, wire, and
gaming consoles.

"The game consoles entered the supercomputing scene in 2002 when Sony
released a kit called Linux for the PlayStation 2," reports The Verge.
Craig Steffen, senior research scientist at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications, and his group hooked up between 60 and 70
PlayStation 2s, wrote some code, and built out a library.

"The PS3 entered the scene in late 2006 with powerful hardware and an
easier way to load Linux onto the devices," the report adds.
"Researchers would still need to link the systems together, but
suddenly, it was possible for them to imagine linking together all of
those devices into something that was a game-changer instead of just a
proof-of-concept prototype."'

-- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/12/03/2214249

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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