The PS3 has already been demonstrating it’s raw computing horsepower from users donating their console’s time for Stanford’s ‘Folding@Home’ project, to process data simulating protein folding for the project. Currently the project is employing 889 TFLOPs of computing power from 36,000 PS3s. As a comparison, 179,000 Windows based machines are only providing 170 TFLOPs.
Directly harnessing the computing power of the PS3’s Cell processor, a professor at the University of Massachusetts is using 8 networked PS3s to provide the same equivalent computing power that he was renting from a supercomputer with 200 processors.