Folding@Home recognised by Guinness World Records

Guinness World Records has officially recognised Sony's Folding@home program as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world.

As previously reported, Folding@home surpassed the one petaflop computer milestone in early September, counting both PC and PS3 users. PS3 users alone reached the petaflop mark on September 23.

"To have Folding@home recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful," said Vijay Pande, associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead.

"Without them we would not be able to make the advancements we have made in our studies of several different diseases. But it is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3, it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds."

The Folding@home program leveraged only the distributed computing power of personal computers from around the world until March 2007, when the PlayStation 3 joined the program.

Currently, more than 670,000 unique PS3 users have registered with the Folding@home network.

SCE has said that it will continue to support distributed computing projects in a wide variety of academic fields such as medical and social sciences and environmental studies through the use of the PS3.