Quarter Million PS3 Users Folding@Home
See Full ImageSee? We gamers are very civic-minded; consummate humanitarians in every sense of the term.
We knew Folding@Home was a success right off the bat, but we doubt the researchers expected the kind of response they'd eventually get. According to IGN, 250,000 PS3 users have registered for the Stanford University program, which means we're "reaching a level of computing power that is of historical proportions."
It kicked off in March, and since then, the computing capacity of the network has doubled and those PS3 owners are churning out nearly 400 teraflops of information (with a maximum of 700 teraflops at any given time) in conjunction with PC owners. This kind of success has led to an update - available tomorrow, April 26 - which sports better "folding calculation speeds" and an increased visibility of user locations.
By combining the significant power of PCs and PS3s, Stanford hopes to break down complex protein structures, which could be used to battle currently incurable diseases like Alzheimer's. If you haven't yet offered your services to the program, you can simply download Folding@Home via the Cross Media Bar. It "folds" when the system is idle, so you don't have to do a darn thing...and still feel good about helping science.
4/25/2007 Ben Dutka
