heard in the elevator

One of the perks of working in a high-level IT organisation is you hear interesting stuff all the time. Well. Most of the time. Or sometimes. Whatever. Coming back to the office from a meeting, one of my tech colleagues was impressing another one with the following quip: 'one of the lesser known applications of a Playstation is the ability to act as a supercomputer when you link for example 9 of them together and use their combined power'.

And when you would spend a fair amount of money on, let's say a Cray, buying 9 PS3's would definitely be a lot cheaper.

That got me thinking. Should be easy to Google stuff like this, no? Turned out much harder than I imagined but hey, I learned soemething new today. FLOPS.

Floating Point Operations per Second.

My brain started floating when I tried to read about it but the point is: yes, the Cray-supercomputer versus PS3 equation exists. Amazing stuff, if you can actually understand what it means.

I humbly withdraw :-)