Folding At Home Bags World Record For PS3

PS3s part of most powerful distributed network ever

Posted by Staff
Folding At Home Bags World Record For PS3
Folding@home has earned the PlayStation 3 a place within the Guinness World Records. The project has been recognised as the “most powerful distributed computing network in the world”.

The record was actually cracked back on September 16th, when Folding@home – which is run on the PS3 and PCs by Stanford University - surpassed one petaflop. A petaflop, if it sounds like something we just made up, is described by Sony as “the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second.” What you basically need to know is that the feat has never been matched by a distributed computing network before.

Additionally, the efforts of PS3 users put the PS3 alone at the petaflop mark on September 23rd.

There are now more than 670,000 unique PS3 users registered with the project worldwide.

“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.”

Sony was equally pleased. “To have PS3 play such a large role in allowing Folding@home to be honored by Guinness World Records is truly incredible”, said Masayuki Chatani, Executive VP and chief technology officer, Technology Platform, Sony Computer Entertainment. “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, if you're not familiar with it, is a project that makes use of the PS3 and PCs' processing power to analyse protein folding and its link to certain diseases while the machines are stood otherwise idle.
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