This is cool:
Stanford University’s Folding@Home project, which puts personal computers to work studying the complicated process of protein folding, could soon get a big boost from an unlikely direction. Starting this month, owners of Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game console will be able to take part in the research project when they’re not busy playing games.
Researchers have recruited about 200,000 desktop machines to participate in the project, which has implications for medical science. But the officials are bullish about PlayStations, according to Scientific American, because the gaming devices actually perform some simulations faster than most computers.
Here’s the whole Scientific American story. And there’s lots more distributed computing projects where that came from, such as Project RC5 which our Mac mini at home crunches on all day and night.
[via Wired Campus Blog]
Technorati Tags: Distributed computing, Folding@Home, RC5
Filed under: Crypto, Software, Technology
Yep, this has been going for a little while now. In fact, the PS3 makes up over half of the Folding@home project’s total processing power.