PS3 users boost Folding@home project

One month after the PlayStation 3 launch of Folding@home, which was included with firmware update 1.6, Stanford University has reported the response from owners of the console as "phenomenal." Since the PS3 part of the project went online in March, more than 250,000 PS3 users have registered for the program, more than doubling the power of the network.

An update to Folding@home will be available for download from tomorrow, April 26, and will feature "an improvement in calculation speeds, increased visibility of user location on the globe, and ability for users to create longer donor or team names." The update to version 1.1 can be downloaded by restarting the Folding@home application.

The project works by utilising the idle processing power of PCs, Macs, and PS3s as a distributed-computing project that investigates the causes of diseases including Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, and various cancers.

Folding@home program lead and Stanford University professor of chemistry Vijay Pande commented, "The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward. Thanks to the 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."

Sony concluded that it would be supporting a wider variety of distributed computing projects in the future, across the medical and social sciences and environmental studies fields.