What exactly made it so easy to install Linux on the PS3 anyways? Either way, I'm intrigued

Sounds to me like you're doing something similar to what the Fold@Home project is doing. Ars had a nice article on the subject about a month back.

How many PS3s, if I may ask? Doesn't Sharcnet have 4000-odd processors, with 1500 or so in the Phys-Eng building?

If you're using the PS3s for parallel programming, I suggest you read a bit into GPGPU, apparently one of the profs at waterloo is an world authority on it.

Hikaru, you might want to talk to the CM club as well (they're down that hall past MathSoc). They have two PS3s, and as far as I know haven't gotten around to doing much with them yet, as far as I know, and I'm sure they'd be up for some cool suggestions.

Out of curiosity, what size are the hard drives in the PS3's that you guys got?

Out of curiosity, what size are the hard drives in the PS3's that you guys got?

Wow It's a freaking revolution!

A PS3 has an ethernet port, no?

Yeah, but the router is upstairs and I'd need about 50 ft of cat 5 to reach it.

As a few of you know, I'm involved in some Bioinformatics research for the Applied Math department at Waterloo; basically just helping to write code to parallelize some RNA-folding code (not written by us) and spread it among large grids, like Sharcnet.

Furthermore, as recent stats have shown, it turns out that the PlayStation 3 is actually very effective at this sort of thing relative to its cost. So we've convinced the Math Endowment Fund to buy us a few PS3's, and if we get good results with them, they'll buy a lot more. Of course, in order to run this code (a mixture of C and Java) on them, we need to install an Operating System on them that can run this. Yellow Dog Linux to the rescue!

I took one of the PlayStatons home with me over the weekend and spent a few hours installing YDL on it; it was supremely easy. In fact, the PS3's own OS facilitated most of the process. It's such a refreshing change to see console manufacturers actually go out of their way to HELP people doing this sort of stuff, rather than doing their best to hinder it.

Anyway, in a short time, it was up and running (SSH even came prebundled). I've attached some screenshots below of SSH sessions from my Macbook Pro.

A picture's worth a thousand words, so ON TO THE PICTURES =)

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r59/hikaru79/Picture1.png
This is just my first ever SSH entry into the PS3. /proc/cpuinfo output is included just to make sure I'm not lying

Here's a more interesting one: http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r59/hikaru79/Picture2.png
The top terminal is the code for a really quick benchmark I wrote in C (an intentionally inefficient recursive fibonacci).

The bottom-left terminal is an SSH session showing the new PS3 workhorse running that benchmark.

The bottom-right is my local computer (the Macbook Pro) running the exact same benchmark.

As you can see (if the picture isn't too small), my 2.16 Ghz Macbook Pro is running the benchmark almost six times faster than the Playstation 3. This goes to show that in order to make these things worthwhile, we have to take advantage of the SPE's. To this end, we've been recommended to use RapidMind, which is Waterloo's C++ platform for "stream programming". I have no idea how to do this (yet), but I'll keep showing screenshots and benchmarks as they show improvement =)

I'll also put up some photographs of the Playstation running on an actual TV with Linux as proof. (It's running Gnome at the moment, but it will just be in terminal mode most of the time). I'll do that in the morning; I dunno where the digital camera is right now and I don't want to wake up the whole house looking for it.