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The Folding@home™ program gets a significant boost from PlayStation 3
Stanford University's Folding@home program - a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases - was made available to PS3 owners in March 2007 via a PS3 system software update. In little over a month, over 250,000 PS3 users have registered on the program, with the processing power of the Cell Broadband EngineTM more than doubling the pre-PS3 computing capacity of the network.
Folding@home is now one of the most powerful distributed computing networks in the world, and is quickly approaching a level of computing power that is of historical proportions. At a single moment, the program is achieving a total computing power of 700 teraflops, of which 400 can be attributed to PS3 systems. What's more, the publicity surrounding the introduction of Folding@home on PS3 has had a knock-on effect, with a 20% rise in the amount of active PCs contributing to the program.
"The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead. "Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate. We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer's and other diseases."
Get folding
Folding@home is available to all PS3 systems running System Software 1.60 or later. The Folding@home PS3 software has also been updated to 1.1, which improves folding calculations speeds and the visibility of user locations on the globe. The update can be obtained by restarting the Folding@home application, while new users will get the latest version when downloading the application for the first time.
Make sure you stay up to date with the latest features for your PS3 by downloading the latest system software updates as they become available.
| Publish date: | 01/05/07 |
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| Category: | News |
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