PS3 Dominates Folding@Home

"PlayStation 3 users around the world have found a completely new way to kick ass online. Take a look at the performance statistics for the Folding@home program as of 8am Eastern this morning:



OS Type Current TFLOPS* Active CPUs Total CPUs
Windows 151 158943 1624489
Mac OS X/PowerPC 7 8706 95321
Mac OS X/Intel 7 2700 7184
Linux 35 24924 215628
GPU 41 689 2178
PLAYSTATION®3 251 10238 11172
Total 492 206200 1955972

Take a look at those TFLOPS. That's PS3 machines delivering over 251 trillion floating point operations per second, 100 trillion more than ten times the number of active PC CPUs, and the number is growing every time I refresh the stats page. Say what you will of the PS3 as a game machine, but this is pretty spectacular to see. Warms the cockles something fierce, and I do so love warm cockles."



Some pretty astounding numbers to say the least. Now if only the PS3 had any must-have games...

If you're not familiar with the Folding@Home project, here is some information:

"What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved."

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