WHEN Todd MartÃnez broke his son’s Sony PlayStation he didn’t realise this would change the course of his . Having dutifully bought a PlayStation 2 as a replacement, he was browsing through the games console’s technical specification when he realised it might have another use. “I noticed that the architecture looked a lot like high-performance supercomputers I had seen before,” he says. “That’s when I thought about getting one for myself.”
Six years on and MartÃnez has persuaded the supercomputing centre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to buy eight computers each driven by…
