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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.
but I thought this was supposed to be a video game console? Where are the games? Perhaps Sony's PR machine can tackle that one.
PS3 owners can set F@H and other Dist apps due later on to run any time to unit is idle, be it for 10 mins or constant. Becuase it only takes around 8 hours (1.0) to crunch a unit they dont need to leave it on as long to do the same work as a PC would so 10 mins here and there would add up quickly.
As much as I dislike Sony, I can't agree with you.
Yeah, maybe they got some free publicity from making it possible to join Folding@home, but do you honestly believe that that's a negative thing?
I think it's amazing that they've actually leveraged that amount of computing power into a project that so sorely needed a boost. I think it's amazing that they F@h people now have to up their ante to keep up.
Hell, Sony could probably get a little more Goodwill-publicity squeezed out of the thing if they gave some kind of credits per X cycles of F@h from your unit as an incentive, but come on. Why complain that they've done something that benefits both them and everyone else?
No, I wasnt. In places like Australia, PS3 is doing well in the charts, often with 2 titles in the top 3. Almost a million people bought PS3s in March alone.
Perhaps it's not running calculations on the GPU on the GP's system...might be an option that can be turned off. As I recall, F@H has two different types of calculations it does (I think the difference is primarily 64 bit vs. 128 bit or something like that), and it does one set on the CPU, one set on the GPU.
By the way, if a folding PS3 is consuming 200 W and you would otherwise have it off when not playing, then for 23x7 folding, it would use about 1700 kW-hours of electricity per year ($150+). Not free indeed.