It's a shame they couldn't make it work out anyway. If the cost really was 5%-10% of a similar off-the-shelf cluster, even without the subsidy it would be, what, 10%-20%? That still seems like a steal.

And Sony gets to sell their gaming console as "US Airforce proven" or "a supercomputer in a box" or whatever marketing spin they want to put on it.

And it is only a couple thousand PS3s anyway, so it is a drop in the bucket.

I wonder if there was some behind the scenes stuff going on, maybe IBM worried or angry that this would devalue Cell processors somehow.