PS3 Claims 1 Million Folding@home Users

Sony says more than one million PlayStation 3 owners have registered for the Folding@home distributed computing project.

Sony Computer Entertainment says that more than 1 million PlayStation 3 owners have signed up for the Folding@home distributed computing project since the company rolled out its Folding@home client just under a year ago. Sony has repeatedly touted the raw computing power of the PS3, and claims that a network of about 10,000 PS3s can perform about the same about of distributed computing work as 100,000 typical PCs, and PS3 users make up about 74 percent of Folding@home’s processing power.

“Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users,” said Stanford associate professor of chemistry and Folding@home lead Vijay Pande, in a release. “Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for Folding@home, allowing us to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world’s most life-threatening diseases. We are grateful for the extraordinary worldwide participation by PS3 and PC users around the globe.”

Folding@home is a distributed computing project dedicated to understanding protein folding and (importantly) misfolding, and how these processes are related to particularly medical conditions and diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.

The Folding@home client is a free download for any PS3; client software is also available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux distributions.