how does the ps3 hack "power many a lab"?

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.

But that only worked as long as the hack worked.

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.

My best guess: Putting Linux on subsidized hardware makes for affordable compute for large labs.

Example [here](https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...).

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.

Maybe North Korean labs