Dr Gaurav Khanna of the University of Massachusetts has built a supercomputer from about 200 PlayStation 3 consoles. He began implementing his idea back in 2007.
Initially, his system used "only" 16 Sony consoles, which simulated black hole collisions. The new supercomputer is intended to help research gravitational waves.
Explaining his choice of hardware in an interview with The New York Times, Professor Khanna said that science has become very expensive and that, given his needs and goals, the PS3-based solution simply turned out to be one of the cheapest. The PS3-based supercomputer runs on Linux.