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Computer hobbyists and researchers take note: two U.S. scientists have created a step-by-step guide on how to build a supercomputer using multiple PlayStation 3 video-game consoles. The instructional guide, posted this week online at ps3cluster.org, allows users with some programming knowledge to install a version of the open-source operating system Linux on the video consoles and connect a number of consoles into a computing cluster or grid. The two researchers say the guide could provide scientists with another, cheaper alternative to renting time on supercomputers to run their simulations. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics professor Gaurav Khanna first built the cluster a year ago to run his simulations estimating the gravitational waves produced when two black holes merged. Frustrated with the cost of renting time on supercomputers, which he said can cost as much as $5,000 to run a 5,000-hour simulation, Khanna decided to set up his own computer cluster using PS3s, which had both a powerful processor developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, but also an open platform that allows different system software to run on it. PlayStation 3 systems retail for about $400 Cdn. On the how-to-guide Khanna says the eight-console cluster is roughly comparable in speed to a 200 node IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Khanna says his research now runs using a cluster of 16 PS3s. The fastest supercomputer in the world, IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has 3,250 nodes and is capable of 1.105 petaflops, or 1.105 quadrillion floating point operations per second, about 100,000 times faster than a home computer. Massachusetts Dartmouth computer scientist Chris Poulin, who co-wrote the instructional manual with Khanna, wouldn't reveal the number of flops the system can achieve, but said anecdotally the cluster has allowed him to run simulations in hours that used to take days on a powerful server computer. Khanna's not the first researcher to us