Its easy to forget, more than three years after the strange launch of the PS3, that the Cell processor at its core was revolutionary, fostering a roving, amorphous, resource-seeking blob of software that gave the chip its name, and remains today in the supercomputer class. As part of a games console, the $400 million tech child of IBM, Sony and Toshiba, five years in gestation, was meant to bring us limitless, photorealistic, Gibsonian cyber worlds that never came to be. But its always had applications beyond gaming, and pallets of PS3s have been bought up by some very unlikely places.

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Though the Cell is available in various bits of industrial hardware, Sonys subsidy the loss that it bears on the sale of consoles to establish the PS3 platform and make that money back long-term on game sales makes the PlayStation 3 the cheapest way to get one, and researchers seeking colossal computing power have taken advantage.
In January of 09, NPR ran a story on the PS3 as a discount supercomputer, covering its use in clusters networked batches of eight or more, pooling their power as one brain in labs across the country, meditating on problems from differential equations to black hole simulation. Its the supercomputer you can get at Best Buy, at sensational savings compared to the alternatives, and the US Air Force, looking to save me and my fellow taxpayers a few dollars, gawd bless em, wanted a piece of the action. A big piece.
Last year the Air Force bought 336 PlayStation 3s, wiring them together on metal racks at a lab in New York state and, one presumes after a kick-ass local game of MAG, put them to work. That was just a test. A few months ago, satisfied that the idea worked according to projections, they spent $663,000 of their Department of Defense budget on 1,700 more PS3s to create a terrifying hive mind, brooding on god-knows-what sinister predictions, calculations or simulations. They were happy; they like scary things. Shortly afterwards, Sony disabled the PS3s ability to run anything but games. They were angry.
The star-crushing mega-cluster humming away in New York, as well as those modest research clusters of eight and 16 consoles in university labs, rely on the PS3s quirky ability to run Linux, which Sony lately nixed to protect copyright concerns. The USAF can keep running what they have, without the firmware update, but any repaired or replaced machines will be useless. The project cannot be sustained; hardware fails. That $0.6 million bargain suddenly reveals a steep downside.
More than just a delightful faux pas in which Sony has directly managed to upset the only organization in the world ever to drop nuclear weapons on people, the episode calls into question the invisible hand companies now have, and their right, or lack of it, to remove and disable features remotely. Apple can brick your phone, EA can charge you to play a used game, and Sony can cut off your Havok physics simulation of a mile-wide death ray carving across China.