Many research labs in scientific fields other than CS need a lot of compute power and have an insufficient budget.
In the PS3 era, the PS3 had the highest compute power (FLOPS) to cost ratio of any commercially-available computer, due to a combination of its parallel architecture and the fact that Sony's business model was to sell the console at a loss and make up the money by taking shares of game revenue (and by charging $6 a month to allow the console to connect to the Internet)
But it turned out that it was possible to jailbreak the PS3 to run software other than certified PS3 games (this was officially allowed at first, but Sony quickly pulled the plug). And as a result, the best bang for your buck for "highly parallel we just need FLOPS" supercomputer workloads was to build a rack of PlayStation 3s.
> Sony actually allowed "OtherOS" until Geohot screwed it up for everybody and they locked it down.
I recall exploits allowing some level of access to the RSX and other components Sony had locked away from OtherOS as far back as 2007, and Sony had already removed OtherOS from the PS3 Slim with no warning or explanation in August of 2009.
Geohot didn't even start on the PS3 until December of 2009. At that point Sony had already made it clear that they no longer saw value in OtherOS and wanted to get rid of it. Geohot's exploit (which was janky, required external hardware, and didn't even enable homebrew much less piracy) gave them a convenient excuse but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have jumped on any other excuse.
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I do love how Sony immediately learned the hard way that there are a lot of very skilled people out there who are more than happy to play in a sandbox and not make a mess in the rest of the yard as long as it gives them enough room to do something interesting, but if you take the sandbox away they're going to play everywhere else.
PS3's, prior to the otheros block, were turned into supercomputers in quite a few labs. The US Air Force had the 33rd fastest 'supercomputer' by building a networked cluster of them at one point. Doing this was substantially cheaper than actually purchasing a similarly powerful actual supercomputer.
The hack allowed users to continue using them as such, though to what extent that persisted I don't actually know.
I worked as a undergrad assistant in a research lab in 2011-ish, and the lab had a shelf full of PS3s working as a cluster. Regretfully my project didn't get to use it.
I know but updating your system is a choice, it was perfectly fine to keep your clusters at an older firmware version. I know for a fact that a university in my home town managed such a ps3 clusters after 2010
Okay so circa 2011 it was powering some labs. Don't think there are many/any frontier labs in 2026 running ps3's, or at least no one has provided any evidence of that still..
Much later, I got to deploy 20,000 PS5 chips to mine ethereum. When PoS happened, we shut it all down. Now those boards (BC-250) are being sold on ebay for $200 and people are running AI on them.