PlayStation 3 storms Folding@Home leaderboard

Stephen Withers
Monday, 26 March 2007 09:23

Your IT - Home IT

The addition of a Folding@Home client to the latest PlayStation 3 firmware has delivered a major boost to the distributed computing project.

The PS3 accounted for 481 of the 738 TFLOPS of processing power participating as at 25 March. That's almost two-thirds of the number crunching being done.

Furthermore, it equates to approximately 0.016 TFLOP per PS3. For comparison, the Windows-based PCs that currently deliver 154 TFLOPS to the project only manage 0.001 TFLOPS each. This does not provide a measure of the relative power of the different systems, just the average amount of processing power being delivered to the project after 'interruptions' for real work.

"[A]s we communicate with the distributed clients fairly infrequently (no more frequently than every 8 hours), it is hard to precisely know how many machines are running and these numbers are best used as an order of magnitude estimate of the power of our network," the project team notes in a FAQ.

PS3s are currently performing a more limited range of calculations than PCs, though the project is aiming to extend the platform's range.

The total computing power available to the project should increase as more PS3 owners install the new firmware. On the other hand, participation may drop off as the novelty factor wears off and owners mull the tradeoff between the social value of the project and consuming an extra 200W of electricity per hour by leaving the console switched on.

Clients are also available for Linux and Mac OS X.

"Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved," according to the project's home page. The object is to explore protein folding and misfolding, which is implicated in diseases including Alzheimer's, BSE, Huntingdon's, Parkinson's and many cancers.