September 19, 2007
PS3 Helps Folding@home Become the
First Distributed Computing Network to Reach the Petaflop Milestone
Gamers Help Scientists Speed Up
Their Research and Find Cures for Diseases Including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s
and Cancer
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI)
today announced that PLAYSTATION(R)3 (PS3(TM)) computer entertainment systems,
part of Stanford University’s Folding@home(TM) program, have enabled the
distributed computing project to reach a petaflop, a milestone never before
reached on a distributed computing network. Known amongst the scientific
community, a petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion
floating point operations per second (FLOPS). In other words, if every person on
the planet were to perform a simple mathematical calculation, such as
calculating a percentage, each person would have to perform 75,000 calculations
every second for the world’s population to achieve a petaflop.
By achieving a petaflop, scientists
with the Folding@home program are now able to conduct research that typically
would not be possible for 10 years down the line. Thanks to the PS3’s powerful
Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (Cell/B.E.), scientists will now be able to make
greater progress in their studies of protein folding and its link to diseases
such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and certain forms of cancer.
"The recent inclusion of PS3 as part
of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power
that goes far beyond what we initially hoped," said Vijay Pande, Associate
Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead.
"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."
"When we introduced PS3, we knew its
incredible processing power would allow for a great deal of innovation and
creativity," said Jack Tretton, president and CEO of SCEA. "It’s extremely
rewarding to see that the scientific community has found a way to harness PS3
technology for humanitarian purposes and we continue to be amazed at what gamers
and the Folding@home community have been able to accomplish in such a short
amount of time."
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.
The Folding@home program up until recently leveraged only the distributed
computing power of personal computers (PC) from around the world. The PCs that
made up the Folding@home network numbered roughly 200,000 giving the program the
equivalent of about one- quarter of a petaflop. On March 15, 2007, PS3 joined
the program and since then close to 600,000 unique PS3 users have registered to
the Folding@home network, bringing the overall computing power of the program to
more than a petaflop.
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.
The Folding@home program up until recently leveraged only the distributed
computing power of personal computers (PC) from around the world. The PCs that
made up the Folding@home network numbered roughly 200,000 giving the program the
equivalent of about one- quarter of a petaflop. On March 15, 2007, PS3 joined
the program and since then close to 600,000 unique PS3 users have registered to
the Folding@home network, bringing the overall computing power of the program to
more than a petaflop.
PS3 users can join the program by
simply clicking on the Folding@home icon within the Network menu of the XMB(TM)
(XrossMediaBar) or can optionally set the application to run automatically
whenever the PS3 is idle (*1).
