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Folding@home turns PS3 into the console equivalent of Johns Hopkins photo

[Psst - Join the Destructoid Folding Group!  #55789 ] 

Yesterday, PlayStation 3 firmware upgrade 1.6 finally went live and with it came the awesome distributed-computing, disease-fighting power of Folding@home. If you aren't reading Slashdot daily, you might have glossed over this whole Folding@home phenomenon, so allow me to spell it out for you; Folding@home is a program that links hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of computers all over the world together so that all of the spare, idle processor cycles that would normally go to waste while you're bathing, sleeping or masturbating can be better used to help scientists study how amino acids "fold" within the human body, thus granting insight into diseases caused by this process going haywire, such as Lou Gehrig's Disease, Parkinson's and Pacman Fever. 

According to the above-linked article from Next-Gen, there were fourteen thousand PS3 owners running Folding@home as of noon yesterday, a group no doubt dedicated to the eradication of disease and finally figuring out why the hell they actually purchased that black doorstop.

(Editor's Note: Honestly, it was a toss up between the above punchline and a joke about how they couldn't afford any games after spending six Bejamins on a sub-par Foreman Grill, but the one I went with had swears, so, obviously, it was the victor. -- Nex)

(Editor's Note #2: If you stare really hard at the Folding@home screensaver, and cross your eyes just a little bit, you can make out a boat with a penis on the sail. -- Nex)

(Editor's Note #3: No, wait ... scratch that ... it's Ernest Borgnine. -- Nex)


Continue reading: More Sony stories





23 comments | showing # 1 to 23
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zaqu's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 04:24
zaqu
do we have a folding team?
Samit Sarkar's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 04:26
Samit Sarkar
First comment, w00t!

I have my PS3 at college and came home for the weekend on Thursday night (no Friday classes and I called out of work). I left my PS3 on to fold proteins (and maybe melt my TV, which sits next to it) while I’m gone. Perhaps it’ll have completed five “work units” by the time I get back Sunday night.

Oh yeah, I’m totally doing it so I can tell people I’m making a “contribution to society,” like the blurb that comes up in your XMB when you move onto the Folding@home icon. Gee, I sure hope my dorm doesn’t burn down because of this...
Samit Sarkar's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 04:26
Samit Sarkar
NOOO! A blasted two minutes late...
zaqu's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 05:00
zaqu
Destrutoid is team 55789

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=55789

ithink that is how link work but anyway that is our score nad team workin on it
zaqu's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 05:01
zaqu
and not nad ,forgive me it 3 in morning
Mxyzptlk's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 05:04
Mxyzptlk
I used to have a PC screensaver that did a similar thing but was supposed to cure cancer. People still get cancer, so I'm guessing I didn't help very much.
Dot's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 05:34
Dot
Note:
705 Active GPUs = 42 TFLOPS
217519 active Playstations 3 = 506 TFLOPS
Something's lacking in efficiency here.
Gameboi's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 09:43
Gameboi
I'm thinking Sony and retailers really ought to stand behind this cause fully, and donate the vast majority of these unsold consoles to John Hopkins. At least we'd know they were being used, and for a good cause.

It's not like Sony's actually doing anything with them at the moment (or the near future, it seems), so why not?
plibt's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 10:15
plibt
Could I deduct the purchase of a PS3 from my taxes?
It is a charitable cause.
JamesSorensen's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 10:37
JamesSorensen
let my shit run all night past 2 evening will prolly let it go all day sunday
tazarthayoot's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 10:50
tazarthayoot
I'm with Plibt, if I can use this as a tax write-off, I'm gonna go buy a ps3 today.
Bluefusion's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 10:54
Bluefusion
How a bout a little friendly competition with Kotaku? They just started their F@H team as well.
Creamsnake's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 11:01
Creamsnake
@JamesSorensen: Don't they have some kind of medicine for that?
deiga-the-semivaliant's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 11:28
deiga-the-semivaliant
Creamsnake is funnay! lol!
Joseph Leray's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 13:05
Joseph Leray
What I want to know is why Stanford can't do this themselves. Not trying to be a dick, I really don't know that much about it, but what about protein folding makes PS3 customers good candidates for doing it? Why can't Stanford run these experiments. It's what they do.
zaqu's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 15:29
zaqu
imma foldin ma gpu's
ceark's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 17:01
ceark
I'm joinin' team dtoid. screw kotaku.
Mxyzptlk's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 17:12
Mxyzptlk
@ Orcist: Harnessing the power of inactive PS3's helps immensely with the number crunching. Like I mentioned before, this isn't the first time something like this has been done. There was a screensaver that helped map out possible molecule combinations that could lead to effective cancer medications, and also one that processed the data received by the SETI project from the Arecibo radio telescope (as seen in the movie Contact). Using the combined power from numerous machines linked to the internet means they can get the info processed much more quickly.
zaqu's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/24/2007 18:35
zaqu
@orcist stanford dont have near the resources they need to work on these kind of things so they take the power of *proccessors* all around the world to help with research
Sean Fischer's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/25/2007 03:32
Sean Fischer
Orcist, I'll break it down for you reaaaaaallly simple. Bluegene/L is the worlds fastest computer. It cost more than $100 Million to build. It has something like 130,000+ processors. It's currently capable of running approximately 360 TFlops, but that's a maximum, it's more accurate to say it runs at about 280TFlops, or 280,000 GFlops, which is something that may be more understandable for people to grasp. Now, lets flash over to the F@H stats page. 28,000 PS3s active... For 686TFlops, or 686,000 GFlops.

So, Stanford could shell out $100 Million for a shiny new supercomputer, and they'd get half the performance of the total distributed processing power of the PS3s running F@H. And this is only 28,000 active clients, out of an install base of 2-3 Million systems (not sure what it's at with the european launch). This is costing Stanford absolutely nothing. Really, this sort of project is something that couldn't possibly be done in a tractable amount of time without massive computing power, and because of the PS3 it has been put in reach of scientists. But here's the kicker. 28,000 * $600? $16,800,000. So we're getting twice the performance of the worlds fastest computer, for 1/5th the pricetag. And this has only been active for about four days? It's astounding, really.

I'm really hoping that this sort of thing catches on. I'd love to see more clients available for the PS3 to run, because the processor is great for these types of scientific analysis. Just as a comparison, there are 160k active windows computers running F@H, but they are only achieving 153 TFlops. Compare that to 28,000 PS3s running at 686 TFlops. In fact, at this point, the PS3 is accounting for something like 70% of all of the Folding being done. Simply put, the applications of distributed computing are amazing, and by making this widely available on the PS3 hopefully we'll see some great scientific results.
Crunshii's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/25/2007 13:56
Crunshii
whats Dtoids Team#? 55789 ?
Creamsnake's Avatar - Comment posted on 03/26/2007 02:33
Creamsnake
...Oh what the hell.
cjpkiller's Avatar - Comment posted on 04/07/2007 00:58
cjpkiller
55789 is the dtoid team
correcto
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