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...

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

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.

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?

let my shit run all night past 2 evening will prolly let it go all day sunday

How a bout a little friendly competition with Kotaku? They just started their F@H team as well.

Creamsnake is funnay! lol!

imma foldin ma gpu's

@ 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.

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.

...Oh what the hell.