PS3 Owners To Simulate Gene Folding

fistfullast33l writes "According to IGN UK, the next version of Playstation firmware will include a joint venture from Stanford University and Sony called Folding@Home. Similar to the infamous SETI@Home project, Folding@Home will be an idle application that participates in a simulation that 'aims to map the way that genes change shape (or fold), so they can be studied by scientists and, potentially, cure illnesses such as Parkinson's or a variety of cancers.' The application will download a 'work unit' that it will unravel to completion, update Stanford's servers, and then download the next unit and continue." We've previously discussed the client; it will be available as an update at the end of the month, and should appear on your cross-media bar once installed.

Comments

Hmm... Folding@Home has been around forever

[bad_fx]

Yet the article and blurb seem to imply that it's a new thing.

Also, here's the info on the Folding@Home website:

http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html

Genes don't fold.....

[charon_1]

proteins do..

Re:Unleash the power...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is one of the few types of the computing problems that the Cell would be good at. You have a relatively uniform stream of data that a large number of simple, unchanging operations need to be applied to and generate a relatively small amount of data that can be streamed out without any synchronization. It is perfectly suited to the architecture of the Cell. It's when you have to apply complex operations or have to randomly access a large set of data and do lots of conditional cases or synchronize the output with other processes (like in games) that the Cell's efficiency goes thru the basement. When will people realize that Sony didn't design the PS3 or the Cell to play games? They took a Blu-ray player (MPEG-2 decoding is one of the few other tasks that can be handled efficiently by the Cell architecture) and tried to make it play games by adding a GPU off to the side and (for a time) a PS2 chipset. It's basically NUON 2.0.

Re:Why in a firmware update?

[tapo]

I assume to get it on as many machines as possible. This also isn't the only new feature in the March 23rd update, other things - like background downloading - will also be implemented.