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Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has announced that great progress has been made in the month since PlayStation 3 users were given the option to join Stanford University’s Folding@home program, a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases.
The program has seen a strong uptake by PS3 owners with more than 250,000 unique users having registered, delivering nearly 400 teraflops of computing power. Total computing power at a single moment is now recorded at 700 teraflops, more than double the capacity of the network before PlayStation 3 joined the program.
Folding@home has become one of the most powerful distributed computing networks in the world, approaching a level of historical proportions – a petaflop of computing power has never before been reached.
“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. “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.“
Sony has also announced that from tomorrow an update for the Folding@home application will be available to further enhance the user experience. This update will feature improved calculation speeds, increased visibility of user location on the globe and the ability for users to create longer donor or team names.
“We continue to be thrilled with the ongoing contributions of the PS3 user community in helping the Folding@home program study the causes of many different diseases that afflict our society,” said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
To download the new update users need to restart the Folding@home application. New users can join the program by clicking on the Folding@home icon with the Network menu of the XBM, and can optionally set the application to run automatically whenever the PS3 is idle.
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