Well, at last I’ve heard of an order of Sony PS3 units without Blu Ray drives. 200 PS3 units have been sold to the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) without Blu Ray drives. These 200 units will be assembled in a large compute node. I expect we will see some large supercomputer clusters in the TOP500 based on these nodes in the coming months and years.
With some wide margins calculations (based on the reports that 17’770 PS3 generate about 435 TFLOPS for F@H, and divide by two for the latest adjustements in calculations announced by the F@H statistics), the 200 PS3 units from EPFL should bring it to a 2.4 TFLOPS Cluster. That’s not enough to bring it into the TOP500 rating, you would need 5.9 TFLOPS to do so.
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