Dave Horvath
27 Aug 2006 6:54
Plunking down your hard earned cash on Sony's upcoming next-gen console, the PS3 could, in fact, help cure many diseases that plague the world. Sony executives met with US Biologists in charge of the folding@home project. In this meeting, they agreed to use the cell processor within the PS3 to harness some of the processing power needed to help the folding@home project work.
For those who dont know, folding@home is a small program the uses an interconnected series of computers to share the work load of data processing to find legitimate possible protein combinations that could cure common diseases. The data distributed among many different computers and devices decreases the processing time needed to find possible solutions by an infintesimal amount. The small folding@home program can be downloaded to your PC or now your PS3 and process protein structures while the device is idle.
folding@home representatives say that a network of 10,000 PS3s armed with their cell processors could effectively do the work of a supercomputer, pushing out a mind numbing "thousand trillon" calculations per second. If this is acheived, the processing power would outnumber that of the world's fastest supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L System which runs a miniscule 280.6 trillion calculations per second, in comparison.
Source:
BBC