The US Air Force has suffered collateral damage after Sony decided to stop its PS3 from using the Linux OS.

According to ArsTechnica the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York picked up 336 PS3 systems in 2009 and built itself a 53 teraFLOP processing cluster. When they got it working Air Force researchers then scaled up by a factor of six and found 1,700 more.

It spent $663,000 to a small company called Fixstars that could provide 1,700 160GB PS3 systems to the government. Basically the move gave the Air Force a supercomputer which was much cheaper than could be done with conventional PC chips.

Sony's decision had no immediate impact on the cluster because the PS3s are not hooked into the PlayStation Network and don't need Sony's firmware updates. However if a PS3 dies or needs repair it can't be fixed and the supercomputer will be a fraction less than clever.