Making a difference

PS3 users support research efforts of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and certain forms of cancer.

Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) has announced that since PlayStation 3 began taking part in Stanford University's Folding@home project on March 22, 2007, the total number of registered users has reached over one million users. This equates to roughly 3,000 PS3 users registering for Folding@home per day or two new registered users every minute worldwide.

"Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for Folding@home, allowing us to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world's most life-threatening diseases. We are grateful for the extraordinary worldwide participation by PS3 and PC users around the globe."

Folding@home aims to understand protein folding and misfolding, and how these are related to diseases and many forms of cancer. When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious consequences, including many well-known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

Prior to the inclusion of PS3 in March 2007, the Folding@home project leveraged the distributed computing power of personal computers from around the world. Now a network of roughly 10,000 PS3s can accomplish the same amount of work as a network of 100,000 PCs, and have the ability to perform research simulations in weeks rather than years. In fact, it took just six months after PS3 joining Folding@home for the project to surpass a petaflops*, a computing milestone that had never been reached before by a distributed computing network. In September 16, 2007, Folding@home was recognised by Guinness World Records as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.

Currently PS3 users make up approximately 74 per cent of the total teraflop computing power of the Folding@home project. For more information, visit the official website at scei.co.jp/folding/en/.

* A petaflops is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).