PS3s boost Folding@home to a petaflop

SONY ANNOUNCED today that PS3 gamers lending spare Cell processor CPU cycles to the Folding@home project have boosted it past the petaflop mark.

The Folding@home project is a distributed network of volunteer computer users who donate their idle CPU cycles to perform complex protein folding calculations. It's run by Stanford University and, according to its boffins, Folding@home works in support of cutting edge medical research aimed at gaining better understandings of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and some forms of cancer.

Until recently the Folding@home project had only about 200,000 PC users worldwide who together delivered about 250 teraflops of computing power. With Sony making it easy for PS3 console users to participate too, nearly 600,000 PS3 gamers have contributed significantly more processing power, lifting Folding@home's aggregate compute strength above one petaflop for the first time.

A "flop" is shorthand for one floating-point calculation per second. A megaflop is a million of those, a gigaflop 1,000 megaflops, a teraflop 1,000 gigaflops, and a petaflop 1,000 teraflops, or one quadrillion calculations per second.

The Folding@home project leader, Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford, said "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. " µ