Tech Shout!

Around a month back, we had reported on Sony’s PlayStation3 (PS3) aiding Stanford’s Folding@home program for further medical research. Now, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. announced that immense development has been made in this duration. Stanford University’s Folding@home program is a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases. Since the program launched in March, participation by the PS3 user community has been outstanding, offering Folding@home with enormous computing power that is helping to fast forward its research. What’s more, with PS3’s powerful Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.), the Folding@home initiative has become one of the most powerful distributed computing networks in the world and is rapidly reaching a level of computing power that is of historical proportions.

Displaying its continued commitment to the program, SCE also announced that from today onwards, it is offering a Folding@home application update that will further improve the user experience. The updated software features an enhancement in folding calculation speeds, increased visibility of user location on the globe and the ability for users to create longer donor or team names.

Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead said, “The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward.” Pande added, “Thanks to 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.”

“We continue to be thrilled with the ongoing contributions of the PS3 user community in helping the Folding@home program study the causes of many different diseases that afflict our society,” said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. “As we move forward, we are issuing a call to action for all PS3 owners around the world to download the Folding@home application and help this cause. These PS3 fans can also be part of history as the Folding@home distributed computing program inches closer to achieving a petaflop – a measure of computing power that has never before been reached.”

PS3 users can download the latest update version 1.1 by restarting the Folding@home application. New Folding@home users can join the program by just clicking on the Folding@home icon within the Network menu of the XMB (XrossMediaBar) or can optionally set the application to run automatically whenever the PS3 is idle.