Ben-DutkaSome of you may remember our story about the PS3's potential to cure diseases , which is plenty intriguing. Folding@Home is a very scientific endeavor that any PS3 user can participate in, and after launching yesterday, the first set of statistics are in.
As you'll see at the official site , the PS3 has already been hugely helpful in providing the researchers with valuable information. Just check out that chart: as of Friday at noon, over 14,000 PS3 users had already connected to Folding@Home (available as a free download), and those users are delivering over 346 trillion TERAFLOPs (floating point operations) per second. What's even more interesting is that this is 200 million more than the number posted by PC participants, and there are 160,000 of them.
If you haven't given it a shot, you should know it's for a good cause. And besides, it takes virtually no effort. Simply click on the Folding@Home icon in the Cross Media Bar and let the system shift to idle mode, which automatically happens if left on with no actions taking place. Oh, and you'll need to have downloaded the recent firmware update (Version 1.6).
It's a very cool idea, yes? Perhaps this whole process really can help in the long run.