I'd love to hear their opinion on removal of the "Other OS" option. I also know several other institutions that have built their own supercomputers out of PlayStations and aren't that happy about that move.
That was a very dick move from Sony. They promoted it like crazy and got a lot of us investing time on this architecture just to back-stab us in the end.
On the other hand, a large institution can invest in a PS3 development kit and develop their crunching software to run within Sony's OS.
Anyway, Cell is dead and both Intel and AMD have similar architectures coming out next year for x86. I wouldn't bet on PS3/Cell right now.
Why not? If the supercomputer was pre-existing, the Other OS option won't disappear unless they do a firmware update. The only reason I know of to do an update is to play the latest games, so unless they're having sessions of GTA in between protein folding, I doubt it's an issue.
PS3 firmwares can now be downgraded. Somebody discovered a service dongle key, which allows for downgrading FWs (but not the latest). That would make it slightly easier to find replacements.
Also somebody is working on some patches which allow
linux to run on top of the same gameos hypervisor that the commercial games do. This allows access to an extra spu and
slightly more ram too. It does require an exploit to allow the execution of unsigned code. Here's the git repo:
http://git.marcansoft.com/?p=asbestos.git
Hector Martin has been playing with kinect for the past month so that explains the lack of progress.
I don't think this is a big issue if you're buying in bulk. With that many PS3's, you should have a good estimate of how many are going to fail in the lifetime of the supercomputer. I doubt the Air Force didn't buy spares already, since they don't want to rely on Sony building new PS3s.
