Comment by nick238
6 hours ago
Unlike the PS3 which the US Air Force bought 1,760 and clustered into the 33rd most powerful** at the time.
(**Distributed computing is very cheat-y compared to a "real" supercomputer which has insane RDMA capabilities)
We had clusters of them in university too.
If all you needed to do was vector math, a dedicated vector processor with eight cores that are capable of running as fast as the extremely wide bus could feed them with data is the way to do it. You couldn't buy anything close to it's capabilities (for that specific task) for the money.
I remember the course we used them in being hard as hell, and the professor didn't really have any projects prepared that would really push the system.