It is becoming more and more evident that Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) can be used in an array of useful things other than playing video games. There's Folding@Home and the NC university professor who created a supercomputer using eight PS3 units among many others. Sony is even now considering the possible commercial uses of the console.

This next one should make that list longer. IBM and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is happy to announce that the first ever course structured around the capabilities of the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) has just been completed.

The course was actually held back in January and lasted for four weeks. It is under the title "Independent Activities Period" and was handled by MIT's Saman Amarasinghe and Dr. Rodric Rabbah from IBM. The course allowed students to design and implement projects running directly on a PS3 unit using open standards software. The best project was a 3D version of Pong and was displayed at GDC 2007.

"This course was able to break down the details of a highly complex microprocessor and challenge students to see where the performance, power and versatility could be applied outside of gaming. Based on the feedback we received from the students, it was a tremendous success," commented Rabbah.

Sony Computer Entertainment helped fund the course by providing PS3 units needed by the students. The video below was one of the project presented at GDC. It's called Blue-Steel and is actually "a parallel ray tracer for generating high quality animations of 3 dimensional scenes constructed of triangles and spheres, with a variety of different lights and procedural shaders."