PS3 Users Boost Home Program

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ony Computer Entertainment officials have revealed that Stanford University’s Folding@home distributed computing project has greatly benefited from PS3 user participation, with the program's computing capacity more than doubling since the console joined the effort.Folding@home is used to aid in calculations relating to the study of protein folding and protein folding diseases and was originally run by joining thousands of PCs throughout the world (with a concept similar to the popular SETI@home screen saver, which analyzes radio-telescope data to find evidence of intelligent signals from space).In March, the project was added to the PlayStation 3’s XMB (XrossMediaBar) via a firmware update.  Since then, more than 250,000 unique PS3 users have registered to participate in the program, lending their consoles' processing power to the research effort.Program officials note that the rapid uptake among PS3 users has spurred additional growth among PC contributors as well, with the number of active PC contributing to Folding@Home increasing by 20% in the last month.Sony also plans to release and update to the PlayStation 3's Folding@home application tomorrow in order to "further enhance the user experience," including an improvement in folding calculation speeds, increased visibility of user location by IP address, and the ability for users to create longer donor/team names. Sony will continue to support distributed computing projects in a wide variety of academic fields through the use of the PS3 console. "The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead. "Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate. We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer’s and other diseases."