Attempts to understand diseases such as Alzheimers have got a boost from Sony's PlayStation 3 console.
More than 250,000 PS3 owners have enrolled their console in the Folding@Home project which uses it to study the shapes proteins assume.
So many have signed up that the project has carried out a year's worth of research in a month.
Proteins that do not fold correctly have been implicated in diseases such as Alzheimers and BSE.
"Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and leader of the Folding@Home project.
Sony signed up to F@H in March and those that have downloaded the program have, at their busiest, racked up a total computing power of more than 700 teraflops. The average computational power delivered by these users is about 400 teraflops.
True, but don't you have to sign up for it? When is "idle" time? When the console is switched off or when a game is paused or something else? Good idea though
My bad this was suppose to go into games not gadgets . Couldn't post in latest .
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I heard about the stats after the first week of the ps3 project going live, and by then the PS3s was kicking out about 5x more calculations than every other computer combined. The computational power of the PS3 is just crazy.
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