PS3 Sets Record For Folding At Home
Say what you will about the PS3, that big black obelisk has helped the Folding@home program set a new record by allowing the computing project to reach a petaflop, something no other distributed computer network has ever been able to achieve. Now, if you're like me and you're not some kind of geek genius, a petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). So a whole lot. Folding proteins is a complex procedure, and since one computer would take up to 30 years to complete, they've organized a computer network that allows everyone to help out, and with everyone computing together, they can work faster and learn how protein folding is linked to diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and certain forms of cancer. And thanks to the PS3's Cell processor, they've got even more power to work with than before.
"The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we initially hoped," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "Thanks to PS3, we are now essentially able to fast-forward several aspects of our research by a decade, which will greatly help us make more discoveries and advancements in our studies of several different diseases."
So there. Now if someone makes fun of you for taking videogames so seriously and tells you you're wasting your time, you can tell them you're not. You just might be helping to cure cancer!
Wootini
Posted to Video Games on 20 September 2007
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: folding@home, ps3, record, sony
Wow. I can't even think of anything smartass to say, and that's a rarity.
Well, that's great and all, but where are the real-world benefits of this? I haven't seen any news which says that this project has directly contributed to finding real cures for any diseases. Maybe I've just been missing them, I don't know...
We're going to be doing an interview with Dr. Pande for our show (DL.TV - www.dl.tv) which will air on October 4th. He should have some pretty interesting things to say about FaH! :)
2 things.
A)I have been to a few lectures at STanford (where they are using folding at home), and it is producing some useful results for the groups that utilize it. Like most research projects, however, it will take many years before real applications come from it.
2) It's easy to dedicate processor down time when you don't have any good games to play [kinda smartassy, not gold but it was worth a shot]