PS3′s highly successful Folding@home aims to make history
Sony today announced it will be releasing an application update for the Folding@home program on the Playstation 3; arriving tomorrow, this update will significantly improve folding performance beyond the PS3′s current capability.
Released on March 25th for PS3 owners, Folding@home is a 50MB download that allows gamers, when they’re not using their system, to contribute some of their console’s unused computing power to aid in Stanford University’s understanding of the development of diseases.
Since it’s launch one month ago, the Folding@home project has been a huge success; PS3 owners have more than doubled the computing capacity of the network before PS3 joined making up 60% of the network’s computing power.
Those who contribute to the project are among the over 250,000 users that have registered 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.
Folding@home reached its peak processing point on the same day it launched on the PS3 with over 990 teraflops (1012 x 990 floating point operations per second) making the project one of the most powerful distributed computing networks in the world.
The average computing power, at any given moment, is said to be around 700 teraflops; to put it in perspective, that’s the computing power of over 1 million computers with a 64bit Athlon XP 3800+ processor.
Pande added: “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.”
The news of Folding@home running on the PS3 has also helped spread the word on the project, as the number of active PCs running the software has increased by 20% since its launch on the console.
“As we move forward, we are issuing a call to action for all PS3 owners around the world to download the Folding@home application and help this cause,” said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. “These PS3 fans can also be part of history as the Folding@home distributed computing program inches closer to achieving a petaflop – a measure of computing power that has never before been reached.”
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