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Gaming is often judged to be a worthless activity, but there’s no denying the success story that Folding@home has achieved with the PlayStation 3. Folding@home aims to understand protein folding and misfolding, and how these are related to diseases and many forms of cancer.
Since the Folding@home project launched for PS3 on March 22, 2007 over one million PS3 users have registered, equating to approximately 3,000 users each day or two every minute.
“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.”
A network of 10,000 PlayStation 3 consoles can perform the same amount of work that approximately 100,000 PCs are capable of. Since the inclusion of PlayStation into the program it has been recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s most powerful distributed computing network, totalling more than a petaflop. PS3 users currently account for approximately 74% of the total computing power of the Folding@home project.
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