Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Here Sony’s been going after high-end gamers — and losing lotsa money in the process — when they could have been pursuing the astrophysicist market.

Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s

…Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called “gravity grid” of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves — ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light — that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place….

One of life’s weird coincidences: my wife and I were just talking about black hole-induced gravity waves during the commercial breaks of last night’s Sox-Indians game. She specifically raised the point that the issue is so hard to study because it’s so hard to find a spare supercomputer for running the numbers. And then today I find out Prof. Khanna’s got his little PS3 farm up an running. Weird!

(Okay, so none of that is true except for the part about Khanna.)

Still, you’d think that Sony would figure out a way to promote hardware hacks like this for folks who might not like the PS3’s price point as a gaming system, but who might have other creative uses for all that gorgeous computing power.

(Thanks to John for the link.)