I Don’t have a PS3, I have an XBox. But I still think the PS3s are great, and I’ve heard that they are relatively powerful. Apparently their chips can process at upwards of 150 gigaflops per second. This is a relatively powerful chips for something publicly available. Some of the more powerful supercomputers, in the world, process at under 2 teraflops, therefore the PS3 processes at about 1/10 the computations respectively. By hooking up the PS3 consecutively, and/or adjacently the processing power can be effectively multiplied by subcontracting the operations. The US military does just this, which is questionable considering how Sony deals with the game terminal.

Sony sells the PS3s at a loss to make profit from kickbacks on game sales. Because of this the US military is effectily causing Sony to loose money. The US military is clearly not purchasing several thousand systems for gaming purposes, therefore a cumulative loss is incurred by the veteran gaming company.

According US military documentation Sony is supplying 2536 PS3 for superclustering purposes. An nice analysis of the documentation is provided by reghardware.