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It appears that the cell processor in the new Sony PS3 does kick butt. New figures released this week show that over 30,000 PlayStation 3 owners have signed up for Stanford University’s Folding@home project since its launch, in firmware update 1.60 on March 23.
The Folding@home endeavour is similar to the University of California-Berkeley’s SETI@home project, which uses the processing power of idle PCs to search the stars for extraterrestrial life. Folding@home taps into spare PC processing power, and also that of PS3s, to study the causes of diseases including Alzheimer’s, cancer, and cystic fibrosis.
Folding@home is currently also being actively processed by 160,000 Windows machines, 13,000 Macs, 25,000 Linux machines, and 800 GPU chips. Sony says it will add a button to the Network Menu on its PS3 to enourage users to connect to Stanford University’s Folding@home programme. Or users can optionally set the application to run automatically whenever PS3 is idle, it annnouced last night.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project attempting to broaden the understanding of protein folding, misfolding which can cause diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and many cancers.
In its announcement Sony claims its Cell chippery is “roughly 10 times faster than a standard mainstream chip inside a personal computer.”
An associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University said he was “thrilled” to welcome Sony to the, um, fold. According to the Stanford Folding@home pages, the Sony PS3 is making mincemeat of all the other types of other “computers” involved in the project. The page shows 30915 PS3 CPUs as responsible for 492 TFLOPS of processing.
In comparison, some 162,197 Windows PCs manage some 154 TFLOPS of calculations. The site measures TFLOPS as the actual teraflops from the software cores, “not the peak values from CPU/GPU/PS3 specs” and notes that Active PS3s are defined as those which have returned WUs within two days.
Perhaps there’s something in the claims for that new-fangled Cell chippery after all.
