Proteins are gonna get owned! (PS3 news)

CNN reports:

"It has so much horsepower and, of course, when you're playing a game all that horsepower will be used for the game. But there are a lot of times during the day when somebody's not playing the game," said Sony's Richard Marks. "It seemed like a good idea to be able to use that horsepower for something else that is, in this case, good for mankind."

Sony worked with Stanford University's Folding@home project to harness the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly.

A network of PS3s would run even faster. Pande said that a network of 10,000 PlayStations would increase speeds by a factor of five, and 100,000 would be 50 times faster than what they can do today.

"It turns two years into one month, and that's a huge thing for us," he said. "It's more than us just being impatient, there are calculations that we don't run right now because any calculation that would take more than two or three years, we don't even start it."

To participate, users will just download a program into the PS3's hard drive. Then they just need to leave the machine on when they're not playing. The Folding@home team will divide their complex calculations into manageable chunks and then send it to the participating machines. The program and data will take up 10 to 20 megabytes - or about the size of a handful of MP3 files, Pande said."

Linky for the full story
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/fun.ga...ding/index.html



This is simply the greatest news of the PS3 in my opinion. Finally a major corporation has decided to do something to benefit humanity without trying to earn a profit from it. I give Sony a 1UP!

It'll be interesting to see how much energy all those ps3's will use while folding, and what that will do to help energy consumption.

I noticed this a week or so ago...posted it in the milestones. but nonetheless Sony kick some serious ass for doing this.


FOLD TO CURE

That's going to suck up a lot more electricity....

way to go Sony Just hope the PS3's have a better shelf life then the PS2's

Better shelf life than still selling 6 months before the ps3 comes out since it was released in november 24th 2000?

That's pretty good going if you ask me.

That's badass actually.

no, I mean the actual console crapping out....I can't even begin to count how many PS2's my friends and I have gone through.....(Life expectancy)

Strange, my ps2's still going strong since i bought it in 2000, and the only consoles that are returned to my work are xbox 360's with reading issues, overheating issues (mainly the temp probe being faulty and saying it's overheating constantly, even when it's not). And then their's the powersupplies being recalled.
Then theirs the problem of it scratching disks if you turn it on it's side while running.

Are ps3's designed and built to be on 24/7....I wouldnt think so. Plus the extra cost for electricity would be far higher than a pc that is designed that wayand can be set to standby mode.

Sure in theory it is a good idea but not very clever.

Why is everyone assuming this is going to be such a power hog?

No different than a high-end PC. High end graphics and processing, power supply, fans to cool it. It may use more power, this is true, but the design of the processor seems to be such that it is very suitable for FAH. You'll get more for every kWh, in the end you'll be saving electricity.

And damn, spending $5 a month for folding! AHHHH!


We seem to have a lot of people here who like to bitch about new ideas...

Not at all....I'm all for new ideas.

Just wondering about the power out-put electricity cost wise.


If it helps with the cause...

not many people are going to want to run their PS3's 24/7... but it's a sick idea.