Sony to launch Folding@Home application on PS3 with firmware 1.6

Thursday 15th March 2007, 05:05:00 AM, written by Carl Bender

SCEI and Stanford University's effort to bring the Folding@Home distributed computing project to the Playstation 3 - first made public by Stanford last August - will come to fruition by the end of this month. Announced via press release earlier today, the application will be available as a 200MB download through Firmware 1.6, expected itself to arrive March 23rd in conjunction with the European launch of the console.

By leveraging the processing power of the Cell BE within each Playstation 3, Sony and Stanford believe that even just 10,000 consoles participating in protein folding operations at any given moment will double the throughput of the entire project; Cell is estimated by Stanford to have roughly ten times the 'worth' of more traditional desktop CPUs as it applies to folding. Users who change their user settings after installing the new application will also have the option to trigger folding operations when their consoles are idling, allowing participation through a passive effort rather than through active boot-up.

Similar to their PC counterparts, the Playstation 3 will be used to tackle diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer, and cystic fibrosis. In addition, the Playstation variant of the program will allow for two visualization modes not available on the PC. One will represent the users console as a point of light on a virtual globe, with every other visible point of light representing in realtime the number of PS3's dedicated to folding at that given moment, and where in the world they are in operation, the second will display the actual 3D model of the protein as it is folded by the Cell processor.

Sony indicates that this is the first step in applying the Playstation 3 to distributed computing projects, and that further medical, social sciences, and environmental projects are also being considered.

sony ± ps3, folding@home, firmware

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