PS3GRID: PS3 Used For Biomedical Research
See Full ImageFolding@Home on the PS3 was such an immense success, other researchers and scientists are taking notice. The Cell processor is apparently intriguing many professionals outside the game industry, due to its sheer power and versatility, and now, another project is on the way. Once again, PS3 owners will get the chance to do something good in the name of science.
It's called PS3GRID, which is...well, they can explain it better than we can:
"PS3GRID is a volunteer computing project based on the PlayStation3 and BOINC for full-atom molecular dynamics simulations and other scientific applications specially optimized for the Cell processor. Your contribution is very important because our Cell MD molecular dynamics software runs over an order of magnitude faster on the PlayStation3 opening the way to innovative computational experiments."
Now, this project is currently in beta testing, and if you want to help out, there are a few requirements you must meet: first, you need to have Linux on your PS3 (which may disqualify a lot of you). Secondly, you must create a project account, and thirdly, you have to download the BOINC client at the site (linked above). Let's hope PS3GRID works out for the scientists like Folding@Home did.
Full-atom molecular dynamics and biomedical research? ...would any of us thought our game consoles would be doing stuff like this back in the NES days?
6/15/2007 Ben Dutka
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