DIY Supercomputer Powered By Sony

So let's say you have roughly $5000 sitting around and want to make a supercomputer. You could try and hunt for the necessary hardware, such as RISC processors, motherboards with high speed bus' stuff like that, and probably spend a small fortune, or you could buy 8 PS3s.

I don't know how much you do or don't know about the PS3's hardware, but 8 PS3s will net you 8 very, very, powerful Cell processors that are made specifically to do mathematical computations really, really fast, which is great for a supercomputer. You also get some seriously speedy system buses, high speed memory and since I am pretty sure these are all 60 GB models, 480GB of storage, which may not seem like a lot, but that's probably enough for about 1 project, then you'd probably have to offload it.

After you got them all networked together, all you'd have to do is find a way to cool them all. After that, the only problem would be hacking them, software wise, into submission to get them to do what you want, probably making them into a Beowulf cluster.

Astrophysicist makes "DIY" supercomputer with a cluster of 8 Playstation 3s [via MAKE]