Ah, that sounded familiar as you described it! Thanks for the correction and context! I'd forgotten how early into multicore we still were. Well that also explains why it doesn't have specific fans then, it's "basically" "just" parallel programming (which people still don't understand!)

Yeah the university running a PS3 cluster was fun news! I recall there being a brief run on the devices as people thought there'd be sudden academic demand for them as supercomputers. I think you could run "folding at home" on them as a screensaver? Which (if I remember right) kind of would make ps3 the biggest research computing cluster around for a while!