After all the complaints. After all the excuses on why sales haven’t been good. At least some good news has come out on the PS3 front:
Sony Computer Entertainment have trumpeted its participation in the medical research project Folding@home. The Stanford University distributed computing project is part of research into understanding protein folding and diseases related to the subject.
PlayStation 3 owners can download and run the distributed computing client for their console and take part, aiding the research.
Tomorrow sees an update to the PlayStation 3 version of the software increasing the calculation speed and enabling the creation of longer donor or team names.
“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. [pull]“Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate.[/pull] We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer’s and other diseases.”
“We continue to be thrilled with the ongoing contributions of the PS3 user community in helping the Folding@home program study the causes of many different diseases that afflict our society,” said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. “As we move forward, we are issuing a call to action for all PS3 owners around the world to download the Folding@home application and help this cause. These PS3 fans can also be part of history as the Folding@home distributed computing program inches closer to achieving a petaflop – a measure of computing power that has never before been reached.”
More thank 250,000 PlayStation 3 owners have downloaded the client and are [pull]delivering nearly 400 teraflops, achieving a total computing power of over 700 teraflops at a single moment.[/pull] Sony says this is more than double the computing capacity of the network before PS3 joined the program
[Boomtown]
OK, it may be silly that its not an actual addicting or even somewhat good game for the PS3… something that may actually push the system. But at least there is some software that is actually using it.
Tags: Gaming, Interesting, Irony, Medicine, Science
