You might find this post by Blake Stilwell at Military.com entertaining. As it turns out the Air Force combined the power of more than a thousand Playstations to create one of the fastest supercomputers in the world:
When the PlayStation 2 was first released to the public, it was said the computer inside was so powerful, it could be used to launch nuclear weapons. It was a stunning comparison. In response, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein opted to try and buy up thousands of the gaming consoles, so many that the U.S. government had to impose export restrictions.
But it seems Saddam gave the Air Force an idea: building a supercomputer from many PlayStations.
Just 10 years after Saddam tried to take over the world using thousands of gaming consoles, the United States Air Force took over the role of mad computer scientist and created the world’s 33rd-fastest computer inside its own Air Force Research Laboratory.
Only instead of PlayStation 2, the Air Force used 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 consoles. They called it the “Condor Cluster,” and it was the Department of Defense’s fastest computer.
Read the whole thing. The experiment, although successful, did not end happily. Sony shut them down.
Just to put it in perspective.
The worlds fastest supercomputer in 2022 had 1.1 exaflops, or 1,100,000 teraflops. At 500 teraflops, the supercomputer made of PlayStation 3’s had 1/2200 of the computing power.
Not bad for technology that’s 16 years old (PS3 launched in 2006).
My original intention was to conclude the post with the sentence “Imagine what they might have accomplished if they had used modern technology!” but thought better of it.