Air Force may suffer collateral damage from PS3 firmware update

[J65nko]

From http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...-air-force.ars

When Sony issued a recent PlayStation 3 update removing the device's ability to install alternate operating systems like Linux, it did so to protect copyrighted content—but several research projects suffered collateral damage.

The Air Force is one example. The Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York picked up 336 PS3 systems in 2009 and built itself a 53 teraFLOP processing cluster. Once completed as a proof of concept, Air Force researchers then scaled up by a factor of six and went in search of 2,200 more consoles (later scaled back to 1,700).

[kpedersen]

This is pretty interesting,

I am sure that they will come to some special arrangement with Sony. Afterall, it is only us little guys that get shat on.

I am sure Sony will be willing to provide them with units with the older firmware for a fair few years into the future

In all honesty, I am pretty sure that cheaper and more powerful clusters can be created with other hardware.