Susan Arendt
Culture

PS3s Double Computing Capacity of Folding@Home

Though it sounded a little hokey at first, the participation of PS3s in Stanford University’s Folding@home project has proven to be absolutely invaluable, as it has doubled the computing capacity of the project. Since the program launched in March, more than 250,000 PS3 owners have registered to take part in it, volunteering their PS3s’ computing […]

Folding
Though it sounded a little hokey at first, the participation of PS3s in Stanford University's Folding@home project has proven to be absolutely invaluable, as it has doubled the computing capacity of the project. Since the program launched in March, more than 250,000 PS3 owners have registered to take part in it, volunteering their PS3s' computing power to help in the quest to unravel the mysteries of diseases related to protein folding.

Vijay Pande, project lead for Folding@home, was thrilled at the contribution the PS3s were making:

The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward. hanks 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.

Thanks to the gamers volunteering their consoles' time and computing power, the Folding@home project has become one of the most powerful distributed computing networks in the world, which means it's due to become self-aware and kill us all any day now.

As of tomorrow, there should be a new update for the Folding@home application that will enhance the calculation speeds, improve the visibility of user location on the globe, and let you create longer donor or team names.