Not OP, but we had PS3s at school as well. Early units ran linux. It was sandboxed to a degree in order to prevent it from being used for software piracy. OP

Not OP, but we had PS3s at school as well. Early units ran linux. It was sandboxed to a degree in order to prevent it from being used for software piracy. OP's project was cool, ours was basically implementing PCA on one. I got the impression that Sony encouraged this use of the console early on. They were probably aiming to establish themselves in the scientific computing niche. We also had nvidia-sponsored labs where they taught CUDA (or at least tried to - it was pretty difficult to do without support and most people took the class for access to computer labs equipped with amazing gaming machines). We all know nvidia won that war.