PlayStation 3 gives strength to Stanford's [email protected]
Since last March, the PlayStation 3 has been one of the leading contributing technologies to the [email protected] effort.
Now, less than a year since release, more than one million users have taken part in Stanford University's [email protected] project. According to Sony, this equates to roughly 3,000 PS3 users registering for Foldin[email protected] per day or 2 new registered users every minute worldwide.
"Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of [email protected] users," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and [email protected] project lead. "Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for [email protected], allowing us to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world's most life-threatening diseases. We are grateful for the extraordinary worldwide participation by PS3 and PC users around the globe."
According to the [email protected] team, a network of roughly 10,000 PS3s can accomplish the same amount of work as a network of 100,000 PCs. It took just six months after PS3 joining [email protected] for the project to surpass a petaflops, a computing milestone that had never been reached before by a distributed computing network. On September 16, 2007, [email protected] was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.
Currently PS3 users make up approximately 74 percent of the total teraflop computing power of the [email protected] project.
The [email protected] program runs simulations in protein folding and misfolding, helping scientists understand – and hopefully curing – diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's and certain forms of cancer. That’s not all the PS3’s CPU is able to do for the medical community, though, as the Cell Broadband Engine is also helping doctors at Mayo Clinic with medical imaging.DailyTech
There are many other avenues with a plethora of information about the [email protected] program and what it is and does. You can find out allot about it by going to [email protected]'s website at http://folding.stanford.edu/ and read up on all the very interesting information. They also have a forums section that you can sign up for and ask away on other questions you may have.
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