Although Sony intimated last summer it planned to let PlayStation 3 owners use those powerful Cell processors for good (well, “good” other than gaming), the company made it official today: by the end of March, a Folding@Home client will be added to the Network menu in the PlayStation 3’s Xross Media Bar (XMB).
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project run out of Stanford University designed to study the complex ways in which proteins assemble themselves—called “folding” how those actions relate to the development and treatment of serious diseases. The process of protein folding (and mis-folding) is incredibly complex and is not yet fully understood by medical science; protein folding research has direct implications for diseases ranging from cancer and Parkinson’s Disease to Mad Cow disease, Alzheimers, and ALS.
