Given that Sony are still more-or-less only breaking even at best on sales of the PS3 console itself, and rely on game sales for it to actually make money, the last thing they'll want are large numbers of PS3 consoles being bought which will never have a single game played on them.

Serves them right really for using a chip which was ill-suited to gaming from the start. The Cell processor (even in its 6 SPE available version in the PS3) is a very good middle-ground for a cheap HPC, between pure CPU architectures which are more flexible but relatively slow, and GPGPU usage which is still quite limited in scope but blazingly fast with what they can be made to do.

I suppose it isn't all bad news for Sony though. At least the sales figures for the PS3 won't be quite so bad as they are now, if they started being bought in bulk for HPC clusters. Even if they don't sell any games for them.