The answer to life, the universe, and everything may be 42, but there are still plenty of other cosmic questions which researchers are looking to answer, and some of them are using PlayStation 3 consoles.
The New York Times reports that Dr. Gaurav Khanna from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has rigged 200 PS3s together to study black holes – effectively creating a low-cost supercomputer.
Aside from matters of cost, Khanna chose the PS3 back in 2007 (when he had 16 consoles) because users could install Linux operating systems on the console. While Sony eventually patched out that option, older systems which have not been fully updated can still be converted to another OS.
“Science has become expensive,” Khanna commented. “There’s simply not that much money going around, either at the university or the federal level. Supercomputing allows scientists to make up for the resources they don’t have.”
Khanna's research focuses on gravitational waves and black holes. As scientists cannot see black holes with telescopes, they need to simulate the waves they generate through computational models.
His initial research was inspired by the Air Force Research Laboratory's own work, which in 2010 incorporated some 1,716 networked PS3s.