Folding@home sets Guinness record thanks to PS3

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 01 November 2007 04:23

Your IT - Home IT

Guinness World Records has recognised Folding@home as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.

The computing power available to the project skyrocketed when Sony included a Folding@home client in a PlayStation3 software update. Before that, participating computers could deliver in aggregate around one-quarter of a petaflop. (A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second.)

In six months, the addition of around two-thirds of a million PS3s to the network lifted the processing power to one petaflop, and one week later on September 23, participating PS3s alone were delivering a petaflop.

"To have Folding@home recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful," said Vijay Pande, associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead.

"Without them we would not be able to make the advancements we have made in our studies of several different diseases. But it is clear that none of this would be even more remotely possible without the power of PS3, it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds."

Masayuki Chatani, executive vice president and chief technology officer, technology platform, Sony Computer Entertainment, added "This record is clear evidence of the power of PS3 and the contributions that it is making to the Folding@home network, and more importantly, scientific research."

Folding@home is a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding as part of research into diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and many cancers.