Folding@home reaches Petaflop mark
The Folding@home distributed computing project of Stanford University has reached the petaflop mark
The Folding@home distributed computing project of Stanford University has reached the petaflop mark.
Sony Computer Entertainment president Kaz Hirai noted the PlayStation 3's contribution to the project during his keynote address at the Tokyo Game Show. According to the project, 80 per cent of their computing power is coming from spare processor cycles on PlayStation 3 consoles.
Current statistics on the project's home page show processing capacity at 1P Flops, 804T Flops of which are attributed to the PlayStation 3. A further 163T Flops come from Windows-based computers and 43T Flops from graphics processors.
The Folding@home project is attempting to unlock the mysteries of protein folding, as misfolds in proteins are suspected to cause several diseases, including Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, BSE and some forms of cancer.
The computer power needed to perform the modelling and calculations is immense, so the Folding@home project breaks it down into smaller pieces which can be handled by different machines such as the PlayStation 3, when its processor is otherwise not being used.