Sony PlayStation 3 Supercompting

Today (3/25/07) Engadget reports that a group of 35,000 PS3 users who are participating in Stanford University's folding@home distributed computing project (where anyone can contribute idle time on their personal computer to participate in complex research into "protein folding" - which may eventually lead to cures for serious diseases) have rapidly jumped to the top of the folding@home leaderboard. Playstation 3s are currently contributing nearly 75 per cent of the 990 teraflops (nearly a petaflop) of what folding@home processes at peak.

Given the poor market performance of the PS3 to date, I wonder whether this would be a reasonable publicity stunt for Sony? It certainly has generated some front-page tech-ink this week. How hard would it be to get 30K+ PS3s (or perhaps even devices that *reported* to be PS3s) on the 'net? I guess it just doesn't jive for me that PS3 sales have been disappointing and somehow 35,000 owners decided to participate in folding@home (here's folding@home's FAQ for PS3 users). Nonetheless, we may all benefit as this sudden surge in massed computing power gets applied against some of our most reviled medical challenges, including cancer and Alheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's diseases.

If you wish to participate in a distributed computing by contributing a minor amount of electricity to run your Linux, Mac, Windows or PS3, here are some projects that might inspire you:

• folding@home - protein research
  
• SETI@home - help analyze radio telescope data to look for intelligent signals from extraterrestrial sources
• distributed.net - an early distributed computing project, this project primarily focuses on development of cryptographic tools
• climateprediction.net - weather forecasting
• malariacontrol.net - attempting to understand and control this disease which kills over a million humans a year and affects hundreds of millions
• The University of California at Berkeley's BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project allows users to choose from many projects and run them on their personal computers (and Sony PlayStation 3s).