Powerful game consoles are often just as programmable as research computers, and scientists are finding real world applications for them every day.
“There is no doubt that the entertainment industry is helping to drive the direction of high performance computational science,” said Professor Peter Coveney of University College London.
The Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii in particular can function as great scientific tools.
Gaurav Khanna, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, uses an array of 16 PS3s instead of a supercomputer to simulate two black holes merging.
“A single high-precision simulation can sometimes cost more than 5,000 hours on the TeraGrid supercomputers. For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer using PS3s. It works just as well, has no long wait times and can be used over and over again, indefinitely,” said Khanna.
We’ve previously seen how the Wii’s cheap motion sensing technology has been useful to surgeons, but more recently, [...]

Original post by Eric Sheline

newVideoPlayer(“macpcstreetflame_gizmodo.flv”, 463, 387,”");The Street is running a new video that cites research from Mindset Media, which pretty much says Mac users are assholes. Okay, they used the term “snobs,” but that was far too offensive to use in the title for this article. Mindset Media surveyed 7500 Mac and PC owners, and what they found seems believable, (we would have worded it differently.) Apparently, Mac boys ‘n’ girls are more likely to use teeth whitening products, notebooks over desktop computers, drive station wagons, pay for downloaded music, frequent Starbucks and have a greater environmental conscious. Sufficed to say, Mac users are largely douchebag-like in character. Douchebags that are reported to have purchased five pairs of sneakers in the last year, but douchebags nonetheless. Checkout the video after the jump; it’s priceless. [The Street via TUAW]

Original post by Haroon Malik