Folding@home Cracks 1 Million PS3s
Apparently PS3 owners like the idea of trying to cure diseases with their systems.
Published: February 5, 2008
Go ahead, make all the snide little comments about the PS3 not having any games to play, and thus the users just end up flicking on Folding@home to keep their machines busy. The fact that there are now over a million people participating in Stanford University's distributed computing project aimed at finding a cure for cancer and other diseases Parkinson's and Alzheimer's means that the PS3 has had some impact in the overall project -- though it's likely that we're far from a cure.
“Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users,” beamed 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.”
The PlayStation 3's architecture is uniquely adept at handling the types of computations needed for distributed computing projects like Folding@home, and not surprisingly the addition of the application to every PS3 out there and the exuberance of PS3 owners to join the program has resulted in some rather impressive numbers indeed.
PS3 owners now make up almost three quarters of all the computing power in the distributed network (Guinness has is listed as the largest in the world now). In just six months, the added power of PS3s pushed the total computing power to an all-time milestone of 1 petaflops. In relative terms, a set of 10,000 PS3s can crunch the data that would normally take 100,000 PCs years to finish in a matter of weeks. With the one million PS3 number cracked, Sony has broken it down to an average of 3,000 PS3s joining the network every day or two of them per second.
Not bad for a games machine, eh? We'll keep our eyes peeled for that first Folding-related cure that's sure to come around aaaaany day now. Yeeeeep, any day now. For more information about the project, be sure to check out our interview with Vijay Pande.
“Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users,” beamed 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.”
The PlayStation 3's architecture is uniquely adept at handling the types of computations needed for distributed computing projects like Folding@home, and not surprisingly the addition of the application to every PS3 out there and the exuberance of PS3 owners to join the program has resulted in some rather impressive numbers indeed.
PS3 owners now make up almost three quarters of all the computing power in the distributed network (Guinness has is listed as the largest in the world now). In just six months, the added power of PS3s pushed the total computing power to an all-time milestone of 1 petaflops. In relative terms, a set of 10,000 PS3s can crunch the data that would normally take 100,000 PCs years to finish in a matter of weeks. With the one million PS3 number cracked, Sony has broken it down to an average of 3,000 PS3s joining the network every day or two of them per second.
Not bad for a games machine, eh? We'll keep our eyes peeled for that first Folding-related cure that's sure to come around aaaaany day now. Yeeeeep, any day now. For more information about the project, be sure to check out our interview with Vijay Pande.