Have you made interesting use of the playstation 3?

Question

I'd like to hear about interesting projects making use of playstation 3 (ps3) hardware.

Answer 1

I haven't, but this is my personal favourite:

PS3 Blackhole simulation - Story

PS3 Blackhole simulation - Details

Answer 2

It can also be used as a password cracker - but I don't think it tops the new GPU-based crackers.

Answer 3

I'm working on porting a few Bioinformatics algorithms to the PS3, in particular, 2 rate matrix algorithms. So far so good, but a long ways to go. If all works out, my lab is going to purchase another 10 :)

Answer 4

We have developed an application that does peak detection/fitting for mass spectra (field is mass spectrometry/proteomics). Some of the estimated parameters from the peak fitting are used for search in molecular sequence database to identify peptides and proteins. It was running much too slow on a normal PC and writing it to run on the PS/3' Cell processor speeded it up approximately 30 times.

This application can be used from any computer (but in practice only from Windows PCs as the client software is written in .NET/Winforms) on our network as it allows requests send over TCP/IP. This TCP/IP based server runs on the PPE and shells out work to the 6 SPEs. (Note about the PPE and SPE links: in some browsers, e.g. Firefox, it may be required to reload the page after initial load in order to jump to the correct location on the page.)