Playstation 3 as crunching machine

The Cell architecture differs quite much from the current standard CPU designs, so while potentially being more powerful, much more effort is needed on the software side.

If you leave aside the synergistic processing elements (SPEs), you get a rather ordinary PPC-based machine. Given the projected price of the PS3, you'd be better off with a bunch of Macs than PS3s.

To make use of the SPEs, thus accesing the full power of the Cells, you don't only need a new compiler; like e.g. with processing data in the Graphics Controller you have to implement explicit, software-controlled memory accesses / tranfers. It will take some man-months of work to implement this.

Thus for Einstein@Home this would make sense for clusters of many hundreds of identical machines, exclusively running Einstein@Home, but if it's for a few dozens of users with one or two machines each, the time would be better spent by improving the Windows App by, say, 1%.

BM