30,000 PS3s Folding@home

More than 30,000 PlayStation 3 owners have signed up for Stanford University's Folding@home project since its launch in firmware update 1.60 on March 23.

The Folding@home endeavour is similar to the University of California-Berkeley's SETI@home project, which uses the processing power of idle PCs to search the stars for extraterrestrial life. Folding@home taps into spare PC processing power, and also that of PS3s, to study the causes of diseases including Alzheimer's, cancer, and cystic fibrosis.

On March 23, the PS3 launched in a number of new regions, including across Europe, Australasia, and the Middle East, along with firmware 1.60, which added the option of participating in Folding@home.

Folding@home is currently also being actively processed by 160,000 Windows machines, 13,000 Macs, 25,000 Linux machines, and 800 GPU chips.