Linked PS3s are also used to model protien folding... which is apparently extremely computation-intensive. Have been for about a year or so.

If memory serves there was an app out there about a year or so ago that you could dl and install on your PC that could do just that. But nowadays I doubt I could remember where or when.

Folding@home

You know, that's actually a Really Good Question. You can get a motherboard and processor chip that's far more powerful than a PS3 for less than half the cost. This leads me to believe there must be some kind of "non-obvious" advantage to using the PS3 set-up over a traditional processor.

Its a game machine. Its best attribute is graphics. Game machines are graphics intensive. That's what they do. So using them to produce images while adopting radar technology only makes sense. Like I said. A precursor to a sensor array ala Voyager. Its all in the 'details'.

The system I'm familiar with used the graphics elements of the PS2s only, as well as a whole stack of commercial NVidia graphics cards for separate applications.