US Air Force is upset at Sony.

Remember that PS3 firmware update that removed the option to install Linux on your PS3? Well as it turns out the US Air Force was using 2,000 of them clustered together to give them 500 TeraFLOPS of power for a research project.

Of course this isn’t an issue quite yet. However should any of those 2,000 PS3’s in the cluster catch the YLoD (yellow light of death) then they will have a major issue. When they send that PS3 into Sony they will automatically load the new firmware onto the PS3, which might prove to be a pain in the butt to remove.

Similar issues are popping up across universities as well. A North Carolina State professor built a smaller cluster of just 16 PS3s back in 2007 to do research on gravitational waves and black holes. The low cost of the PS3 makes them a great choice to build a super computer out of, the price for performance is arguably cheaper than anything else out on the market today.

So the point to this would be that as soon as these PS3s die, there could be a large number of research projects that die as well. I can’t say that Sony is going to want to be on the receiving end of those phone calls, especially after receiving some class action lawsuits for removing the OtherOS feature. My guess is Sony may very well give us the OtherOS back on the older PS3s and who knows possibly even on the new Slim consoles as well.

[Source: Ars Tecnia]

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