I just remember this being a wacky headline from back in the day. Was there any truth to this story? Would it have worked and why would he have done this? Did any other nation try anything like this? What was the Sony corporation's response to this? I would also like to know what happened to this supercomputer, but that may be outside of the 20 years-or-older timeframe for questions.
It was reported the Iraq imported about 4000 PS2s. The original report appears to the WND article:
supposedly based on information leaked by US intelligence. While it was reported that clusters of 12-15 PS2s would provide enough computing power to control a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), there's no evidence that this was actually done. Earlier in 2000, Japan had placed export controls on the PS2 because they had militarily-useful computing power, specifically because they provided enough grunt to be useful for image analysis, in turn useful for guiding missiles or bombs using camera images:
Sony applied for permission to export the PS2, and got it, except for export to Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea. The 4000 Iraqi PS2s would have been re-exported from another country (if they actually existed).
The PS2 (and the PS3) could be, and were, used to build supercomputer clusters. These consoles provide plenty of computing power, at a low price. The profit margins on the consoles themselves were not high - Sony would make their money from games for them. With different manufacturers competing in the game console market, keeping the price low was important. The cheaper the console, the more buyers there would be, and there would be more buyers for the games. Notably, the cost of developing a game is independent of the number of copies of the game that are sold, and the per-copy cost of producing the game is very low. Once the development cost is covered, it's almost all profit. The result: the PS2 provided very cost-effective computing power. This made them attractive for home-built supercomputer clusters for scientists who wanted to stretch their limited grant money as far as it would go. The first high-profile PS2 supercomputer cluster, using 70 PS2 consoles, was built by the US National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, in 2003. This was facilitated by Sony's Linux kit for the PS2, Linux for PlayStation 2 (or PS2 Linux), which was a Linux developer's kit and provided simple access for the use of the PS2's GPUs (graphics processing units) for general-purpose computing:
https://web.archive.org/web/20041120084657/http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/playing_the_supercomputer_game
Similarly, the PS3 was used to build supercomputer clusters, with a small 16-console cluster put together by an astrophysics group at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2007:
This inspired the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to build a larger cluster in 2010, using 1760 PS3 consoles:
This was, at the time, the 33rd most powerful supercomputer in the world, and built for about 1/10 the cost typical of similarly powerful systems. They generously thanked the Dartmouth group by donating additional PS3s, allowing their cluster to be extended to 176 consoles.
and eventually, over 400 consoles:
The PS2/PS3 supercomputer market basically crashed in 2010 when Sony disabled the ability of these consoles to run other operating systems (such as Linux). The "cheap supercomputer" effort had already begun shifting to the use of conventional PCs using high-performance graphics cards for parallel computing, and this continues to the be the cheap-hardware approach to supercomputing.
Without the 2002 Linux kit, Iraq would have faced a difficult project to turn their PS2s into a useful supercomputer. More likely, their intent was simply to use them as stand-alone PCs (which they couldn't import due to sanctions). Earlier in 2000, Sony had announced that the PS2 could run Linux, allowing it to be used as a general purpose computer, although with much more effort required from the user to do so than with their still-to-come 2002 Linux kit.