Maybe Sony should have targeted scientist as well as high end gamers when marketing the PS3. One scientist created a little eight PlayStation 3 farm running Linux plus custom code to solve complex computations. Sony may not be winning the "Console War" (yet?) but they no doubt have proven the power of the Cell processor.

Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.

It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it's a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.

SS4Gogeta via wired.com »