Arnold-KatayevIt's been less than a year since Sony launched Stanford University's Folding@home application for the PlayStation 3, and as of today, over one-million PlayStation 3 owners are "Folding." Folding@home is an attempt at finding cures for cancer and other diseases, by putting to use the PlayStation 3's powerful processing capabilities in order to help determine the characteristics of protein folding and misfolding, and how it's related to diseases including cancer. This milestone means that over the course of these 11 months, the average number of Folding registrants was 3,000 per day.
"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."
Again, because the PlayStation 3 is much more powerful than a vast majority of today's PCs, it has lead the Folding operation in terms of computing power. It only takes 10,000 PlayStation 3s to achieve the same computing status on Folding as it would taken 100,000 PCs. Additionally, that network of PlayStation 3s would be able to perform "research simulations" in a matter of weeks as opposed to years. It took the PlayStation 3 community a mere six months to compute a petaflop, and the entire million-strong network of PS3 'folders' makes up for nearly 3/4 of the teraflop achieved, thus far. Amazing.
