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Comment by hrh | Hacker News Reader

You know we're all bullshitting here apparently but my guess is that happened relatively little. The PS3 was too exotic of hardware to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.

I'm sure internally it was pitched as a neat idea why don't we see what happens (god can you imagine the corporate politics in a decision like that?), but practically it allowed Sony get get special import status.

I'm sure eventually they realized they didn't care about that enough it outweigh allowing those filthy users to possibly do something interesting.

Sony throws a lot of stuff at the wall. There was a good chunk of hardware cut out of later PS3s, not to mention continued attempts and silent canceling of things like those move lightguns, etc.

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My university had a few PS3 clusters. The CS department loved them because you could buy three of them for the price of a good server. The department even offered a crash course on programming for the PS3. I didn't take it, but from what I understand, it wasn't that difficult to program (for the department use cases).

The major use case for these was for number crunching (training neural nets, running physics simulations, etc). And these things were something crazy, like 100x faster than a similarly priced PC server. There were plenty of libraries out there for doing linear algebra.

A quick google search suggests that this was extraordinarily common in academia. I found materials from lots of different universities that were close to what I remember my peers talking about.

This was also a little bit before CUDA hit. So there really wasn't a mainstream offering for doing massively parallel, SIMD calculations.

Edit: I went to Wright State Uni and most of my CS professors did research associated with the Air Force, which as forgotpwd16 notes, had at the time a super computer made from PS3s. This might explain why the PS3 was so popular among our department.

Thanks for that reply, that's very cool. It seemed like a marketing gimmick, I'm surprised to see it was the real deal.

> The PS3 was too exotic of hardware

Wasn't more an issue that games didn't specifically optimize for cell processors? They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.

> to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.

There were at least three largish cluster setups, the biggest being a super computer with almost 2000 PS3s. Of course you are right, that is barely a blip on their sales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

> They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.

That’s what being exotic hardware means.

It would be the same issue for whatever supercomputer code you want to run. If you don't specifically target for the Cell SPEs, you're left with a single PPE that could barely keep up with the Pentium 4s and Athlon64s at the time.

I remember reading an article about the US military using a PS3 supercomputer cluster for something, but it was so long ago I don't remember where or if it was a puff piece or something actually significant.

It was the 33rd most powerful supercomputer at its time and, according to[0] AFRL director, it cost them 5~10% the cost of a system made with off-the-shelf computer parts.

[0]: https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/399987...

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