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.