The partnership between IBM and Sony has made many significant progress, researchers at a new computing lab at the Univ. of Maryland-Baltimore County is going to develop applications for IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine, which is the processor that powers Sony’s PlayStation 3 gaming console.

The researchers at the Multicore Computational Center will be involved in several areas of research, such as visualization and computer modeling application for aerospace/defense, financial services, healthcare/life sciences industries and weather. Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, which are the companies that have decided to bind in partnership to develop new processor; they are also collaborating with Georgia Tech.

The universities have been cranking out supercomputer and research clusters, the IBM’s Cell processor, which is the “brain” of PlayStation 3, has been used to build mini supercomputers; eight PlayStation 3 consoles networked together and powered via Linux has been established to fulfill the need of technology experiment. This experimental research has been dubbed as the “world’s first” PlayStation 3-based academic cluster, the creation boasts the ability to utilize “64 logical processors, and it has been set to be used to handle various research tasks.

According to Dr. Frank Mueller, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, the biggest limitation in its current state is the “512 MB RAM constraint, however, he might try retrofitting additional memory if future tasks deemed it necessary.