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250,000 PS3s Folding@Home
GamesIndustry.biz reports that over 250,000 users have signed up for the Folding@Home project on the PlayStation 3. The sheer number of users has resulted in '700 teraflops in a single moment', most of which is provided by PS3 users. "'The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward,' said Vijay Pande, associate professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead. 'Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate. We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer's and other diseases.'" The article notes the software has a new update with some refined functionality and faster processing.
I guess it is at least useful to society
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
What is going to happen when distributed computing applications "flood the market" and PS3 owners have several organizations vying for their machine's idle time? How many people, confounded by so many choices, will simply choose to donate no computing time at all?
According to the folding@home OS stats page, a total of 99712 PS3s contributed as of 25 Apr 2007. Where did the 250,000 come from?
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According to this page, they are at about 691 teraflops with the PS3 producing 388 of those. I'm kinda confused on where they get the 250,000 number as that page also says there are about 30,000 active CPUs and about 100,000 total (as in 70,000 CPUs once participated but haven't returned data in five days). I mean, there's barely 250,000 total active CPUs including all platforms.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
The premise is that users donate idle system time for computing power. It make sense. I mean how many hours out of a day would you play a gaming system (not necessarily PS3) anyway? Even if there were thousands of titles out for the PS3, any marginally social (or financially conscious) human wouldn't spend all day (and night) playing video games.
I just hope that positive results come out of their research. However, I do agree that this will be a problem when many research groups want you to donate processing time to their applications.
It's called turning it off, and helping do your little bit to cut CO2 emissions and cutting your electricity bill at the same time!
Doesn't Sony know? Curing cancer is so last century, this century it's all about carbon emissions.
A $180 check to the Alzheimer's foundation would be $15 a month to cure Alzheimer's, and it has the further benefits of:
A) letting the foundation pay for whatever research it feels is most important, which might include the folding@home project but might not (or, if you specify with your donation, could possibly go to the project of your choice);
B) does not necessarily consume electricity at residential rates using many, many distributed lossy AC->DC conversions, which for most people means additional cost cooling one's house in the summer and an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions;
C) would be tax deductible, so depending on your tax bracket you could donate $200-$225 to this cause, reducing the amount of money you give the government to pay for whatever it wants, but further increasing the amount of money going to research you want.
Alzheimer's runs in my family, and keeping a computer running at my home all day is a stupid way to cure it. The only possible benefit is that it hides the cost in the electric bill instead of making people write out a check. That would be silly but harmless if that electricity wasn't polluting the atmosphere.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
a very good use of the PS3's spare processing power, and disease research is much more worthwhile than looking for aliens
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