It’s not all doom and gloom for Sony. The PlayStation 3 is doing some good in the world, thanks to Folding@Home.
Folding@Home is distributed computing software, designed to put your computer’s idle processor time towards protein folding simulations. The idea is that it will help scientists better understand proteins, and perhaps one day help contribute towards the cures of certain diseases such as Alzheimers.
PlayStation 3 owners can download the Folding@Home software and let it run in the background when they’re not playing games. So far over 17,000 PlayStation 3 CPUs are contributing to the effort, which have astoundingly almost tripled Folding@Home’s computer power, now at over 650 teraFLOPs (those 17,000 PS3s contributing over 400 of those teraFLOPS… out of a total of almost two million CPUs).
Due substantially to the PlayStation 3, Folding@Home is now one of the most powerful distributed computing projects in the world, within reach of a petaFLOP. That’s a lot of FLOP.
The hope is that one day, the PlayStation 3 will double up as both a portable radiator for the elderly and a scientific volunteer. Games have also been speculated.
Flop, floppity flop!
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