Thank your PlayStation 3 and the Cell processor for the advancements of cancer treatment - following Sony's lead with console application Folding@Home, a biophysicist and computer scientist is now using graphics processing units to enhance his research into the workings of human cells.Samuel Cho of Wake Forest University in North Carolina says that video games have allowed him to perform tasks in the space of a few months that would normally have taken decades to compute. "We have hijacked this technology to perform simulations very, very quickly on much larger biomolecular systems.
"If it wasn't for gamers who kept buying these GPUs, the prices wouldn't have dropped, and we couldn't have used them for science." Looks like
Folding@Home has been something of a life-saving success for scientific research. Nice one, Sony.
Source:
EurekAlert