fidgeting.net

As you may or may not have heard, Sony and Stanford University released a Folding@Home client for the Playstation 3. This is awesome in itself, but what’s more is amazing is the effect it’s had on the computing power of F@H. If you look at the current numbers, the PS3 has almost tripled the computing performance (in teraflops) of every other operating system.

This absurd amount of processing power is primarily due to the fact that the PS3 is designed to produce beautiful graphics, which seems to have the same sort of needs as folding proteins. Video cards, in general, seem to have a tremendous ability to process these sorts of numbers, because if you look at the numbers, although there are only about 700 GPUs (other than PS3) crunching numbers for F@H, they are doing the same amount of work of around 25,000 Linux boxes.

Hopefully this move by Sony will encourage Nintendo and Microsoft to implement similar clients on the Wii and Xbox. By allowing these machines to fold proteins in their spare time, it may very well lead to significant advances in research of diseases such as cancer. Pretty amazing that playing video games may very well lead to a cure for cancer.