Tech Shout!

What goes around, comes around and if you do good, you shall receive good, well that’s surely what’s happened with Sony!

Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) has revealed that the PlayStation 3’s participation in Stanford University’s Folding@home initiative on March 22, 2007, has led to a whooping rise in users, taking the total number of registered users’ figure to more than one million now. These stats mean that at an average around 3,000 PS3 users are enrolling in the Folding@home every day or 2 new registered users every minute around the globe, just within a year’s time since its launch.

Folding@home is a path-braking new move which intends to comprehend protein folding and misfolding, and how they are associated with various diseases and several types of cancer. Fatal ailments such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, along with a number of cancers and cancer-related syndromes can be attributed to the incorrect folding of proteins, resulting in serious adverse effects.

Vijay Pande is the Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home’s project lead. He said, “Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users,” said “Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for Folding@home, allowing us to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world’s most life-threatening diseases. We are grateful for the extraordinary worldwide participation by PS3 and PC users around the globe.”

Before the addition of the PS3 in March last year, the Folding@home project controlled the distributed computing power of personal computers worldwide. Currently a network of around 10,000 PS3s can complete the same amount of work as a network of 100,000 PCs, and also possess the capability to perform research simulations in weeks instead of years. Merely within six months after PS3 stepped into the Folding@home initiative, the project exceeded a petaflops, which is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). This can be regarded as a computing milestone that had never been reached before by a distributed computing network.

At present, PS3 users make up about 74 percent of the total teraflop computing power of the Folding@home project. The much-acclaimed Guinness World Records too honored the project by terming it as the as the world’s most powerful distributed computing network on September 16, 2007.

In December, Sony announced that it will be enhancing the FAH client with the release of a new Firmware v2.1, which offers a host of new features. The updated version of FAH can be automatically downloaded by clicking on the FAH icon.