Just curious, can SciPy also automatically take advantage of cell processors or graphics processors? If it is all just matrix operations, it seems doable?
It cannot, at least not ATM and not out of the box.
I am by no mean knowledgeable in those areas, but my understanding is that using specialized hardware/aggressively optimized code in numpy (or similar tools) would be very hard, though. One of the problem is that CUDA or multi-core optimized numpy would have a significant overhead (obviously of a totally different nature), and would be justified only for very large problems. Multi-code numpy was tried a few years ago by E. Jones, and the overhead was almost never worths it IIRC.
The current solution is to use those through libraries which implement linear algebra, etc... , which can be implemented on top of those architectures. There is obviously quite a bit of excitement around those technologies, and this was one of the most talked area at las scipy conference. Video are available: http://blog.enthought.com/?p=184. Some of them are related to those