PS3s Put a Dent in Research Data Crunching

Participation in the Folding@home project by PS3 owners has doubled the computing power at its disposal.

While the PlayStation 3 has debatably been a flop on the retail market, there’s no question that’s it has made its presence felt elsewhere. According to Eurogamer, more than 250,000 PS3 owners have participated in the Folding@home project, which allows the console’s processing power to be harnessed for research purposes.

The project now as access to 700 teraflops of processing power, of which PS3 owners contribute 400, Eurogamer reported. Flops represent floating point operations per second. A single teraflop is one trillion of such operations. Eventually, the project hopes to push its computing power into petaflop (1,000 teraflop) territory with the help of the PS3. There is certainly more idling processing power to be reigned in: Sony sold more than 1.2 million PS3s in the United States alone between November and March.

Folding@home is used to research protein folding, a complex biological process which the project’s site compares to a machine assembling itself. Eventually, protein folding research could be used to treat or prevent Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and some forms of cancer.

The program works by allowing individual PS3s to download a chunk of project data to work on. When the system is done, usually in 8 hours or so, the results are uploaded back to Folding@home and the process starts again.