"Running on more than 1,700 PS3s that were connected by five miles of wire, the Condor Cluster was huge, dwarfing Khanna’s project, and it used to process images from surveillance drones. During its heyday, it was the 35th fastest supercomputer in the world."*

Back at PS2/PS3 they were used for computing, Sony actually released a kit and had paid staff helping people who wanted to build PS2 supercomputers -- a good friend from college worked on the project at Sony. They had amazing vector processing units in them.

* https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...

Article from 2003 on PS2 setups https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer