Cuddly Knife
10-31-2007, 03:57 PM
...gamers. Hah-hah. Just kidding, also for the power of the PS3. It's actually doing some good in the real world other than keeping me busy when I'm stoned stupid.
PS3 drives Folding@home to world record
Since being integrated into Stanford University's disease-researching Folding@home Project in March, Sony claims that more than 670,000 PS3 users have added their consoles' brunt to the altruistic cause. With that many high-tech Cell processors working toward a common effort, it comes as no surprise that Sony has pushed Folding@home to a Guinness World Record for creating the world's most powerful distributed computing network.
"Without [gamers and consumers around the world] we would not be able to make the advancements we have made in our studies of several different diseases," said Folding@home project lead Vijay Pande, associate professor of chemistry at Stanford. "But it is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3; it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds."
On September 16, the Folding@home network officially set the record by logging one petaflop, or 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second. The network as a whole draws processing power from idling PS3s and PCs from around the world to perform computations that study protein folding. As Sony's console currently drives three-quarters of the network's power, that mark was reached by PS3 users without the help of PCs on September 23.
What's a floating point operation?
PS3 drives Folding@home to world record
Since being integrated into Stanford University's disease-researching Folding@home Project in March, Sony claims that more than 670,000 PS3 users have added their consoles' brunt to the altruistic cause. With that many high-tech Cell processors working toward a common effort, it comes as no surprise that Sony has pushed Folding@home to a Guinness World Record for creating the world's most powerful distributed computing network.
"Without [gamers and consumers around the world] we would not be able to make the advancements we have made in our studies of several different diseases," said Folding@home project lead Vijay Pande, associate professor of chemistry at Stanford. "But it is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3; it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds."
On September 16, the Folding@home network officially set the record by logging one petaflop, or 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second. The network as a whole draws processing power from idling PS3s and PCs from around the world to perform computations that study protein folding. As Sony's console currently drives three-quarters of the network's power, that mark was reached by PS3 users without the help of PCs on September 23.
What's a floating point operation?