PS8

If the Sony PlayStation 3 continues to lose ground commercially, it may find new life in the realm of science and research.

Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star. And that's not a multi-player on-line game.

Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.

The PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it's a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.

The console's Cell processor, co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, can deliver massive amounts of power, comparable even to that of a supercomputer -- as long as you know how to optimize code and have a few extra consoles lying around that you can string together. Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.

"Basically, it's almost like a replacement," he says. "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing -- and for the same amount of money I can do these runs indefinitely."

Researchers have tried similar tests on the Nintendo Wii, but stopped because swinging that controller around like a fairy is embarrassing.