Kotaku
Astrophysicist Dr. Gaurav Khanna is using eight linked Playstation 3s to measure what sort of gravity waves would be produced if a super-massive black hole were to swallow a star.
The eight PS3s, donated to the doctor's research by Sony, replace Khanna having to tap into supercomputing sites at $5,000 a pop, Wired reports. He said the "gravity grid" of PS3s, which has been up for about a month now, are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes.
"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."
The other of course is the upcoming release of Eye of Judgment.... better pick up a some velvet robes Dr. Guarav "Gravity Grid" Khanna.
Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s
