folding

I used to fold paper airplanes and throw them from the 2nd story of my house to see how far they'd go, but this is way cooler. This weekend I'm using my PS3 to help find a cure for cancer.

Stanford University [ok as a Cal alumnus I feel somewhat obligated to call them Stanfurd, rhymes with turd huhuh] has been using home PCs and now PS3s in a distributed computing network called the Folding@Home Project. People who want to let their computers/PS3s help the Project simply download the Project application, and then let the program run in the background, effectively donating their idle computer processor time. The Project tackles the massive task of analyzing folding proteins -- due to the huge amount of calculations required it typically would require a supercomputer, but by dividing up the task into smaller work units and handing out assignments to individual machines -- homework, if you will -- the power of everyone's computers is combined in one of the largest distributed computing networks in the world. Good stuff.

But it gets even better. The PS3's Cell processor has been touted as one of the most advanced CPUs you can buy today, and Sony has teamed with Stanford University to take advantage of that. The CPU crunches away at its homework, and the RSX graphics chip displays the actual protein folding and geometry in realtime for you to see. And in the background, a world map slowly rotates and shows you, world-wide, all the other PS3s that are crunching away as well as little points of light. That rates a 10.0 on the geek scale for me.

It's nice to know that I can do something for medical research so easily, and it requires so little effort -- just leave the PS3 on and let it put the smack down on some misbehaving proteins. I almost feel guilty when I interrupt it to actually play a game -- almost. I still gotta play my games, sucka!

Folding@Home on the PS3

Gizmodo: PS3 Triples Folding At Home's Computing Power to Over 500 TFLOPS..PFLOPS in Spitting Range