PlayStation 3 cluster

Before and during the console's production lifetime, its powerful IBM Cell CPU attracted interest in using multiple, networked PS3s for affordable high-performance computing.

[2] Terra Soft Solutions released Yellow Dog Linux for the PlayStation 3,[3] and sold PS3s with it pre-installed,[4] in single units and in 8 and 32 node clusters.

[7][8][9] In mid-2007, Gaurav Khanna, a professor in the Physics Department of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth independently built a message-passing based cluster using eight PS3s running Fedora Linux, named the PS3 Gravity Grid.

[10] Khanna claims that its performance exceeds that of a 100+ Intel Xeon core based traditional Linux cluster, on his simulations.

[20] In May 2008, The Laboratory for Cryptological Algorithms, under the direction of Arjen Lenstra at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, built a cluster of 200 consoles which broke a record for the Diffie-Hellman problem on elliptic curves.

In November 2010, the Air Force Research Laboratory created a powerful supercomputer, nicknamed the "Condor Cluster", by connecting together 1,760 processors with 168 GPUs and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of 500 trillion floating-point operations per second (500 TFLOPS).

[25] Along with thousands of PCs already joined over the Internet, PS3 owners contributed to the study of improper protein folding and associated diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, and cancer.

The software was included as part of the 1.6 firmware update on March 22, 2007, and can be set to run manually or automatically when the PS3 is idle through the XrossMediaBar.