The US Air Force has spoken for the first time about the removal of Other OS from Playstation 3 consoles.The US Air Force spoke very proudly when they announced the purchase of over 2000 Playstation 3 consoles for research clusters, Hailed as a way to save taxpayers money and deliver CELL processors cheaper than any other solution the US Air Force first built itself a 53 teraFLOP processing cluster using 336 Playstation 3 consoles. The Air Force says it knows of the impending lawsuits stating: "We are aware of class-action lawsuits against Sony for taking away this option on systems that used to have it."
Seeing the merits of this solution the US Air Force attempted to obtain another 2,200 consoles which was later scaled back to 1,700 consoles, After verifying from Sony that bidders for the contract could provide that amount of contracts the Air Force spent $663,000 to make the project happen.
Sony's decision had no immediate impact on the cluster as the consoles as logic would suggest are not signed in to the playstation network and are not updated, However the problem goes far deeper as a statement from the Air Force Research Laboratory suggests their disappointment with Sony.
As it turns out when these consoles inevitably break or fail finding replacements for them is difficult but even worse for the Research Laboratory is the fact when refurbished consoles are returned by Sony the consoles they receive arrive with the latest and great Playstation 3 firmware... Minus support for Other OS.
The Air Force is not the only one to be potentially affected by this issue, with cheap Playstation 3 academic networks starting to appear worldwide not only will this cut off supplies of cheap processing hardware but it will also doom existing clusters when all units eventually fail.
The article if anything raises some questions and possibly suggests that the US Air Force is interested in the matter being resolved.
A similar issue will confront academic PS3 clusters, which have sprung up in labs across the country. In 2007, a North Carolina State professor built himself a small cluster that he cobbled together after "he spent a few hours one day in early January driving from store to store to purchase the eight machines."
The University of Massachusetts has 16 machines networked into a cluster called the "Gravity Grid," used to look at gravitational waves and black holes. According to the physicists at UMass, the PS3's "incredibly low cost make it very attractive as a scientific computing node, i.e., part of a compute cluster. In fact, it's highly plausible that the raw computing power-per-dollar that the PS3 offers is significantly higher than anything else on the market today."
All such projects will last as long as the machines survive or used machines are still available, but new hardware can't be added and refurbished machines can't be used. A class-action lawsuit has recently targeted Sony for removing a promised feature retroactively, though the issue is unlikely to be decided anytime soon.
We asked Sony for comment on how its decision would affect scientific computing clusters, but received no answer before publication.
