J. Cosmo Cohen: Right before I purchased my PlayStation 3, my friend began telling about Folding@home. When I finally purchased it and got home, one of the first things I did was click on the Folding@home icon. That's when I entered the world of protein folding.
Maximum PC: Walking into the Pande Lab at Stanford University is somewhat of a hardcore geek’s ultimate dream. This is, after all, where the real work gets done—or should we say, work units. For the various desktop systems and consoles scattered around the area are all a part of a larger initiative that likely you and I, as well as Stanford graduate students, researchers from around the globe, and consortiums of geeks and enthusiasts alike, have all contributed to.
Dr. Vijay Pande, an associate professor of chemistry, structural biology, and computer science over at Stanford—as well as the longtime director of the Folding@Home distributing computing project, which his aptly titled “Pande Lab” oversees—estimates that around 400,000 systems actively “fold” at the current moment. Given the program’s fairly linear growth of around 40,000 new systems a year, Folding@Home should be able to push past half a million “connected” PCs easily before its crystal anniversary.
Amazing project.
Amazing feature on PS3 to help the project.
Critical Gamer writes: There has been a lot of hype about the power of the Cell processor residing inside the PlayStation 3. Whether or not we will see its full power being exploited remains to be seen, but it has been put to good use by medical researchers in America with the folding@home project.
I’m sure a lot of PS3 owners are unaware of the program folding@home residing on their PS3. This little piece of software has been designed by boffins at Stanford University in the USA, and is used to perform mathematical calculations of proteins when they misfold in the human body. I know you’re probably wondering what I’m wittering on about, so here’s what it is all about.
My problem is I can't do anything with my PS3 when using folding@home if it was in the background I would use it more
Microsoft should be supporting folding@home as well on the 360. Bill Gates is always seen donating money to charity, so why not help with this project? They should try and get it integrated into the OS of PC's, Mac's and all the consoles, and have it running in the background.
I use my console for gaming and blu-rays, sorry. I also turn off my console when it's not being used for said activities.
How a couple of egos and extrinsic motivations turned Folding@home into a bloody cold war competition, where work units were as valuable as kill counts.
lls good post. Funny story. I'm tempted to start a Folding war with some of my buddies now :)
I am not a hardcore Folder, but I have completed about 40 work units and have personally spoken to Vijay Pande through emails, hoping to get Sony to advertise this more. Some people think you have to leave it on all night, but there is an option to Shut Down the PS3 after the current work load has been complete.
This is what I have started doing, number crunch a work load, and then the PS3 automatically turns off when it send the result back to the University.
I am extremely impressed by the statistics on the Folding website, PS3 is many times more efficient than PCs for this according to the tables, but even more impressive are the Graphics Cards... they are giving unbelievable performance!!