Networked PS3s Break World Record

Stanford University's Folding@home program has assembled the most powerful distributed computing network yet, but there's no mainframe systems involved. Instead, the network is made up of PlayStation 3 consoles.

Can you say your PS3 is helping to cure cancer? PS3 owners participating in the Folding@home project can. The Cell CPU in the devices are being utilized en masse to do work to understand the nature of protein folding.

The act of proteins "misfolding," when they assemble incorrectly in the body, can result in several serious diseases such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow Disease, CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many types of cancer. Stanford's distributed network handles the huge amount of computations that research in this area requires.

On September 23, 2007, the Folding@home network of over 670,000 PS3s set the world record by surpassing 1 petaflop of computing power. The previous record was set by Folding@home only a couple of weeks before, staking its claim as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world.

Until March 15, 2007, the network consisted only of PCs, numbering about 200,000 and only getting about .25 petaflop. But once the PS3 version of Folding@home's application was released, the computing power of the network had quadrupled in a mere six months.

Research findings are posted on the Folding@home site, and with increasing support from PS3 users across the globe, news in the field will likely be updating rapidly.

To participate in the project, you must download the free Folding@home application from the PS3's XMB and execute it. Then select the Folding@home icon under Network from the XMB home menu. The application automatically downloads work units from Stanford's dedicated server, computation is performed in the background on your PS3, and results are uploaded back to the university. This process repeats as long as the application is running.

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