Since when is the operating system part of the hardware?

The idea of using gaming machines for computation is a good one but unfortunately gravitational waves do not exist as will become apparent when LISA is finally launched and no gravitational radiation is found.
It is a shame all that money is going to be wasted trying to find something that does not exist.

Wow – quite a bold assertion considering every single other aspect of General Relativity has been confirmed to the nth degree. Why do I find it hard to believe that some random guy posting on an internet forum has probably not figured out a superior theory to GR? Hmmm… Couple that with the fact that there is more and more indirect evidence emerging
for the existence of gravitational waves that gels perfectly with Einstein's theory, and I think it's pretty clear cut.

But like I always say – we'll find out soon enough. And the odds of gravitational waves not being directly detected seem to be vanishingly low.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=7640

If you know it with such certitude, why don't you publish your proof? Unless you indeed have a theoretical proof about the non-existaence of gravitational waves (which I doubt), then if the computation serves nothing else than confirming your assumption, it is already of much bigger value for the science than a blind assumption.

Congratulations to the scientists for their innovation and resourcefulness.

Since they're losing money on every console sale and only profiting from game sales, they're probably not looking forward to scientific studies buying up hundreds of PS3s and no games to go with them.

Still, any publicity is good publicity, especially if it's good publicity.
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Reply to Chris:

I would actually disagree that Sony is feeling a ambivalent about it since the article says that the researchers received a partial donation from Sony. Obviously it would be a write off for Sony and the positive publicity is an added bonus for them so they are making out on the deal.

Going with a second switch and more ps3 units was probably above the budget.

Since they're losing money on every console sale and only profiting from game sales, they're probably not looking forward to scientific studies buying up hundreds of PS3s and no games to go with them.

Still, any publicity is good publicity, especially if it's good publicity.

Also @ reevesAstronomy and Hunnter,

Your idea about 255 is about as false as it gets, subnetting and IP addresses are not even related to this subjects, they are part of networking, not physically linking processors to get more calculation power.

16 was probably chosen as the most cost effective to do the calculations in the amount of time they want to perform them in.

But there is no real physical limit, outside of human knowledge in managing networks.
If its not much knowledge, then generally, 255 would be the max, 0–255 being the last section of the IP for the machines.

I remember hearing about this a little while back, glad they got it up and running now.
Should be interesting what kind of things they could simulate with it.
I wonder if they could simulate the solar system in real time to a detail of 1KM, that would be fantastic for something like Spore. (shame Spore isn't as up to scratch as it was a year before release… )

"the raw computing power per dollar provided by the PS3 is significantly higher than anything else on the market today." If this is true and they can link more than 16 than I can see research facilities buying these things like mad. And planetariums too.