Surprisingly, this article isn’t from The Onion.
The biggest problem with programming for the PS3, as I understand it, is that it’s rather difficult to get the most out of the hardware due to the multi-processor nature of the processing core. I’m not sure that making a cluster out of PS3 really gets around this problem….
Related: Virginia Tech hand-built a supercomputer out of Apple Macintosh XServes called System X back in 2003/4 that, at the time, was one of the top ten fastest supercomputers on the planet. These days, it doesn’t even crack the top 500.
Also related: OpenCL, a programming language designed to solve the problem of how to write code for systems that feature multiple diverse (i.e. non-identical) cores; what this means in English is that this lets programmers use the very powerful but very specialized graphics processors that most modern computers have for general-purpose computing; in short, this kind of solves the programming for PS3 problem in a general sense.
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