PS3 update boosts Folding performance

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 26 April 2007 02:52

Your IT - Entertainment

An update to the Folding@home software for the Sony PlayStation 3 should further improve the console's already impressive contribution to the project's number-cruncing capability.

The PS3 client has more than doubled the total processing power available to researchers since it was made available last month. The latest statistics from Stanford University show the PS3 delivering 387 of the 689 teraflops currently being delivered by participants' systems, and the new version is able to perform the calculations even more quickly.

"The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead. "Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate. We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer's and other diseases."

Although more than 250,000 PS3 users have registered, the number of active PS3 is just under 30,000. An active PS3 is one that has completed a 'work unit' within the last five days. PS3 participation has tailed off after the initial enthusiasm - on March 25 it accounted for 481 of the 738 available teraflops.

The 1.1 update can be downloaded by restarting the Folding@home application. Other changes include improved user location via IP address (the project web site maps participants' locations) and support for longer donor or team names.

And there may be more to come: "SCE will continue to support distributed computing projects in a wide variety of academic fields such as medical and social sciences and environmental studies through the use of PS3 and hopes to contribute to the advancement of science," company officials stated.