PS3 offers a huge help for Folding@home
Sony announced that great progress has been made in the one month since PS3 systems became part of Stanford University’s Folding@home program, a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases. Since the program launched in March, participation by the PS3 user community has been phenomenal, providing Folding@home with immense computing power that is helping to fast forward its research. Furthermore, thanks to PS3’s powerful Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.), the Folding@home program has become one of the most powerful distributed computing networks in the world and is quickly approaching a level of computing power that is of historical proportions.Exhibiting its continued commitment to the program, SCE also announced that starting tomorrow, it is providing a Folding@home application update that will further enhance the user experience. The updated software features an improvement in folding calculation speeds, increased visibility of user location on the globe and the ability for users to create 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. “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.” Because the process of folding proteins is so complex, computers are used to perform simulations to study the process. Since these simulations can take up to 30 years for a single computer to complete, Folding@home enables this task to be shared among thousands of computers connected via the network, utilizing distributed computing technology. Once the data is processed, the information is sent back via the Internet to the central computer. The Cell/B.E. processor inside each PS3 is roughly 10 times faster than a standard mainstream chip inside a personal computer (PC), so researchers are able to perform the simulations much faster, speeding up the research process. No matter how popular these distributed computing programs are, I don’t believe in it too much, just because I haven’t seen any results so far. But if you have some extra bandwith and you have your console turned on anyway, this may be a nice project to join.
Comments(15)
What results are you expecting?
Protein structures don’t really give “results” they just help gain a better understanding of interactions or drug design. these drugs take 15 years to be fully marketably developed.
I think this combination of science research with the network of PS3 gamers is very interesting indeed. Now I will read up on it. Many thanks for the post
I think that this is a great initiative and I’m glad that the purpose of such an expensive entertainment system can be extended with good causes like this one. In this way gamers can help on creating a solution for a lot of problems.
By the way, nice post. I wasn’t aware of this until now.
Here are some:
http://folding.stanford.edu/results.html
Ps3 ftw
Provides an interesting argument as to the energy inefficiency of folding at home. That said, people are far more willing to give their PS3 computing time rather than hard $, despite the former consuming the latter.
http://www.xyhd.tv/2007/04/rants-and-tangents/folding-at-home-is-killing-the-planet/
Downloading the update right now. It even looks awesome!
wow, theres an advantage to the ps3 now?
with this huge computing power, who knows if ppl are not cracking some passwords for FBI or something… fucked up government can get anywhere these days… and i am sure they can hide it as some protein calculations very easily
@groove – agreed, and in addition I personally don’t care if new drugs or medicines even come out of the results, as long as research is being done that expands human knowledge (and it doesn’t hurt anybody/thing to do it) then who knows what benefits it may have in the future. We’re still only just starting to understand the practical applications of research that was done over a hundred years ago, so I’m glad to be able to contribute my effort with a few cents worth of electricity having my PC run at >90% load when it would otherwise be doing nothing, just for this type of project.
the reason why intel and such hasent done it yet well for one they will and for 2 there isnt really a need yet for the mass public sony is trying to be ahead of time why could make or break them in this case this is for a good cause
and also the “chink” who shot up v tech did it for political reasons even though it was a lil extreme
well, actually the Cell processor is based on Power architecture like the old Mac chips were, so you wouldn’t be able to run windows on it natively.
I fold on 5 different machines 24/7, it’s my way of giving back, and I barely notice a difference when using my PCs while folding. Then again I built some high-end rigs, not some Dell bullsh!t.
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=userpage&username=ReelFiles
asdfasdf: i am not killing anybody, neither planning to do it… i am just not going to participate in anything i dont have complete knowledge about, thats all i am saying! I cant verify what the hell is going to be processed on my machines, so i am not going to do it. Government and its slaves are everywhere these days… you must be really naive or stupid if you dont know it and dont see it… this virtual supercomputer in hands of US university is so powerfull tool. Maybe you should see a doctor for your stupidity… unfortunately, there is no cure for your disease
and while everyone’s standing around feeling noble, the jerks at stanford turn around and sells any discovery they make to merck and pfizer, which will slap a patent on it as fast as they can get their greedy hands on the data.
@juju, yea, except for the part where all the data is freely available.
Thanks for the info!