The PlayStation 3’s Cell processor must really be something. The US government wants to use them, they’re powering cutting-edge medical research, and now they’re being used to simulate black hole physics.

Astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna has stacked 16 PlayStation 3 consoles together to form a supercomputer that is being used to simulate the activity of huge black holes for the Physics Department at the University of Massachusetts. Register Hardware says that these 16 stock PS3 systems, loaded with Linux and networked with a easy Gigabit Ethernet switch, give the same processing power as a 400-node supercomputer.

“Overall, a single PS3 performs superior than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer,” Khanna stated.

You can hit up the PlayStation 3 Gravity Grid Web page for the full details.

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