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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.
Of course the PS3s are spending the time doing Folding@Home.
It's not like there's any games to play on them.
Tried it but couldn't get past the first boss level.
[Insert pithy quote here]
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?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
What a shame - all those PS3's, and not a single decent game to play on them.
A similar question is how long until PS3 owners lose interest in this? F@H has been around a lot longer than the PS3. I've been running it on my PCs for a couple years now off and on, but are gamers going to keep leaving their machines on at night once the novelty and "my machine is helping cure cancer, how about yours?" wears off?
Insert Sig Here
Best laundry sim on the market.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
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?
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.
The PS3 barely puts out any heat when folding. I was surprised when I checked it in the morning and it was completely cool and not blowing out much heat. For perspective, when playing a game, the hot air coming out feels like my car's exhaust. The actual system stays pretty cool, though, which is a tribute to their cooling methods.
"This is scientific research that will eventually be patented..."
Um... from the FAQ:
Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them? Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.
Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.
More Twoson than Cupertino
It shouldn't be too surprising that the GPU would be the most energy hungry component... That's how it is in PCs too.
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.