Andre Yoskowitz
5 Feb 2008 15:21
Less than a year since its release, Sony has announced that one million Sony PlayStation 3 users have taken part in the Folding@home technology, making the console the leading contributor to the effort.
According to Sony, that means 3000 PS3 users registered for Folding@home each day, equivalent of 2 new registered users every minute.
"Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for Folding@home, allowing us to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world's most life-threatening diseases. We are grateful for the extraordinary worldwide participation by PS3 and PC users around the globe."
The Folding@home team has stated that a network of 10,000 PS3s can "accomplish the same amount of work as a network of 100,000 PCs." The team also noted that merely six months after PS3 joined the effort, the project surpassed a petflop, a milestone that had never been hit before by a computing network. Late last year, Guinness World Records called the project the world's most powerful distributed computing network.