Folding @ Home Petaflop Barrier Crossed

The official PlayStation blog is reporting that the petaflop barrier has been crossed by the nodes participating in the Folding @ Home project. The article talks about what this means for computer science, and why this awesome amount of computational power was reachable. "Just six months after we launched the program, nearly 600,000 PS3 users have registered. Second, we made several improvements to the application (v 1.2) that helped make the computations more accurate and enabled us to squeeze even more work out of each and every PS3 console -- we went from 450 teraflops to 800 teraflops. These factors, combined with the contribution from all the other platforms, helped us cross the barrier, which happened sometime over the weekend."

Comments

how much science is being accomplished?

[crayz]

Their project list doesn't seem to have been updated in quite a while. Many of their recent papers seem more focused on how to scale and utilize the type of computing cluster they have than they relate to any sort of medical progress

I'm not dismissing the contributions to the study of computer science, but the stated goals of the project are:

The Folding@Home project ("FAH") is dedicated to understanding protein folding, the diseases which result from protein misfolding and aggregation, and novel computational ways to develop new drugs in general. Here, we briefly describe our goals, what we are doing, and some highlights so far.

We feel strongly that a distributed computing project must not just run calculations on millions of PC's, but d.c. projects must produce results, especially in the form of peer reviewed publications, public lectures, and other ways to disseminate the results from FAH to the greater scientific community. Below, we also detail our progress in these areas as well.

EULA

[toolie]

I'd be a lot more interested in Folding @Home if their EULA wasn't so damn draconian. When I thought about installing it, I just glanced over the EULA to see if there was anything outrageous in it. There was a section that basically said they could monitor what I'm playing on my PS3 at any time - whether I was running it at that time or not.

Re:Sweet! Protein Folding is a great use for PS3s

[Trogre]

It's only wasted power if you don't want the heat. If you live in a cold climate you've got yourself a perfect small heater with a COP of 1. So your thermostat-controlled heater won't need to work quite as hard to maintain your room at the target temperature, so you break even energy-wise and effectively get your F@H flops for free.

Of course if you're in a hot climate and want to cool the room, well the opposite is true. You're wasting more power (200W to do the F@H work, and 200W/COP for the A/C unit to shift the heat out of your room).

Barrier?

[UNFAIRMAN]

Dear Slashdot editors,
Its a milestone not a barrier. The 640k memory limit on PCs was a barrier. Going faster than the speed of sound was a barrier. A barrier requires technical challenges to be met to move beyond a specific maximum point. A milestone is significant only in artificial numeric terms, such as reaching a percentage of a goal, or achieving a number of ops per sec that happens to be divisible by 2^10.

Its still quite newsworthy and very cool, but it isn't a broken barrier.

Re:Sure... it's awsome for this...

[DigiShaman]

I doubt the FDA would allow for Open Source Drug development in our own homes. So, your only source for such curing chemical compounds is through the drug companies.

A life saving cure may be found a lot sooner thanks to this folding research. And I would rather have my life saved when in need than be bitter over who's CEO pockets I will be lining.

Life isn't always fair. But we should at least make it more bearable for those stricken with an unfortunate ailment.