1. No one updates supercomputers automatically. Instead you firewall the compute nodes and have a team dedicated to maintenance and support to do periodic upgrades.
2. I'm sure they had a support contract, which may have included running an entirely different firmware. I have no specific knowledge, but based on other supercomputers I've worked with, these are often very custom machines, despite the "commodity" hardware. The odds that they were running the consumer version of the firmware are low to nil.
> Rome Lab asked the Department of Defense for $2.5 million to assemble its supercomputer. By the time money to buy that many was approved in 2009, PlayStation 3s were hard to find. Rome Lab bought as many as they could — 1,700.
I can't imagine Sony really gave them custom firmware for just 2k units, right? Especially since all the money from a console is from games sales. Seems like a lot of work for nothing. Maybe they hacked something in on their own though
2. I'm sure they had a support contract, which may have included running an entirely different firmware. I have no specific knowledge, but based on other supercomputers I've worked with, these are often very custom machines, despite the "commodity" hardware. The odds that they were running the consumer version of the firmware are low to nil.