When Sony issued a recent PlayStation 3 update removing the device's ability to install alternate operating systems like Linux, it did so to protect copyrighted content - but several research projects suffered collateral damage. 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. Once completed as a proof of concept, Air Force researchers then scaled up by a factor of six and went in search of 2,200 more consoles (later scaled back to 1,700). The $663,000 contract was awarded on January 6, 2010, to a small company called Fixstars that could provide 1,700 160GB PS3 systems to the government. Through a firmware update, Sony has removed OtherOS support. This doesn't immediately affect institutions as the research clusters do not connect to the PlayStation Network so the update can be ignored. Where it does become a problem, however, is if consoles die or need to be replaced. If a system needs to be sent to Sony for repair, it will come back with the latest firmware and won't be able to run Linux.