Everyone always preaches that the PlayStation 3’s hardware and power is unmatched and how we have yet to harness it’s true potential (Kinda sound’s like Star Wars doesn’t it?). While all that apparently hasn’t been a big enough selling point to the general populace, it has however, attracted the eyes of science.
I remember when there were rumors about PlayStation 2s having the capability to launch nuclear weapons, but this is just ridiculous. However, Dr. Gaurav Khanna, an assistant professor at Dartmouth, jerry-rigged 8 PlayStation 3’s together, creating essentially, a super cheap, super computer.
It’s being used to solve the mystery of what happens when a massive black hole, a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star. He created what he’s calling the "gravity grid" of PS3s to calculate the theoretical gravity waves, which are ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light.
This is all using predictions from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Get all that? Easy as pie.
Apparently the Cell processor used in the PS3 has the ability to deliver insane amounts of power, close to that of a supercomputer. They were also designed with the intent to use parallel processing, thus allowing the 8 PS3s to work in perfect unison. Combine that with the console’s open platform, enabling it to run linux and Khanna’s custom program, and you got yourself a cheaper, more effective supercomputer.
Look on the bright side Sony, if you bomb out of the gaming industry, you can just combine all your remaining PS3s to make Skynet and take over the world. Well, that’s one way to get market share, isn’t it?
Via [wired]
