Folding@Home hits the Petaflop milestone thanks to PS3

Posted Sep 20, 2007 at 12:08AM by QJ Staff Listed in: PS3 Tags: Folding@Home, Jack Tretton, SCEA, Sony, Stanford University

Stanford University's Folding@home program has broken the petaflop milestone thanks to Sony's PlayStation 3. For those who don't know what a petaflop is, it is the capability of a computer to do a quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). That's the equivalent of every person on earth doing 75,000 simple math problems per second.

Folding@home was designed to simulate protein folding and perform molecular dynamics simulations. The data gathered here would be used to understand the progression of diseases such as Alzheimer's, mad cow, cancer, and even Cystic Fibrosis.

Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead pointed out that thanks to the PS3s and its owners who ran Folding@home, the research process on the different diseases being studied has been sped up by a decade. The president and CEO of SCEA Jack Tretton also spoke about this achievement saying that:

When we introduced PS3, we knew its incredible processing power would allow for a great deal of innovation and creativity. It's extremely rewarding to see that the scientific community has found a way to harness PS3 technology for humanitarian purposes and we continue to be amazed at what gamers and the Folding@home community have been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.

This is something that PlayStation 3 owners who have been running Folding@home should be proud of. After all, without the 600,000 gamers who registered and helped out the project, this wouldn't be possible.

Join: QJ.net Folding@Home Team: #52781

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Comments

# Cool! — koji_m 2007-09-19 19:46

That's great news!

# thanks — King Victor V 2007-09-19 19:59

as a avid folding @home user 447 Working Units I thank all the other users for your help. BTW for those that don't know a WU is equivalent to 8 hours of PS3 working on the F@H program :)

# Thanks !!! — Bobby Brown 2007-09-19 20:28

"the research process on the different diseases being studied has been sped up by a decade" => Simply increadible !!! The PS3 will save the WORLD !!!

# Damn — god0fgod 2007-09-20 00:42

I need to do more work units. I've only managed 1 so far.

# Yup — Stealth! 2007-09-20 02:40

It is, seems like PS3 keeps on hitting new records, And congrats to Sony and F@H. I am a proud registered user and happy that i contributed in history, now to cure those diseases.

# WTF!?!?!?!?! — ISOHaven 2007-09-20 05:57

This is certainly awesome news!

How long has F@H been on the PS3? In that little time my PS3 has surpased my PC by leaps and BOUNDS and my PC has been folding for well over a year!

# thats great but .... — noonespecial 2007-09-20 09:37

I wonder where the stat 600,000 comes from. there are only 250,000 total PS3s according to f@h

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

# Um — Stealth! 2007-09-20 21:19

Not entirely accurate. That site isn't the direct source to show how many PS3's are registered.

# QJ staff — Stealth! 2007-09-20 22:28

Out of curiosity where does the 600,000 number come from. And where is the link for this article as well.

# Hi there. — Guest 2007-09-21 00:17

The information came straight from the press release. :-)

# Thanks — Twenty-Se7en 2007-09-21 05:01

Thanks for clearing that up Enrico

Great stuff - a decade... wow

# 8 hours? — Twenty-Se7en 2007-09-21 05:04

Why does it take my system about 9 hours then? Crap, lol

# stats — noonespecial 2007-09-21 05:34

If the folding@home site doesn't have the accurate number, when can the accurate number be found?

# xbots must be so piss how cool the PS3 is — houaruto 2007-09-21 05:49

as a matter of fact xbots are always trying trash talk the PS3 every time an article about it comes up. I know i know it's finally starting to sink in to their peanut brains that the PS3 is superior and with this achivement to back it up all they can do is make up some dumb lies and twist the article around to to keep their denial that xbots is becoming a primitive system

that can't even play for a few weeks without breaking.

sorry mommy can't help you Bots this time

it's so great to actually read a PS3 article with out xbots flaming all over the place about how wanna be cool they think their xbot is (but it's trash, play it for 2 days and it breaks down=trash)......well this article sure shut them up dam well.

Haha PS3 still has the last laugh.......

# who cares about the numbers its not that important — houaruto 2007-09-21 05:56

If you actually understood what the article is about you would know that its about great the PS3 is and what it is capable of.

The facts has been proven. Unless you have another big article to back you up everything you say will only be taken as a joke and just proves how dumb and stubborn you are.

So go get an article and we'll talk.

# Hmm thanks — Stealth! 2007-09-21 06:50

Enrico one more question is there a link to that press release.

# I contributed 500WUs! :) — AuDioFreaK39 2007-09-29 16:27

and up to now I have contributed 500 work units of that power solely with my single PlayStation 3 since March 22, 2007 when Folding@Home for PS3 was released :)

# Great news — theTick197 2007-10-03 13:18

Is good for the console to leave it folding 24/7? ive noticed that it really warms up when im running F@H. maybe ill just buy one of those console fans and not worry about it.

# WTF!?!?!?!?! — ISOHaven 2007-10-18 04:18

Were you dropped on your head as a child?

What the heck are you talking about?

Learn to read English then we'll talk!

# WTF!?!?!?!?! — ISOHaven 2007-10-18 04:26

As long as you allow the unit to properly ventilate then it will be fine. Don't put it in a cabinet or keep it closed up.

Mine has been on 24/7 ever since F@H was released.

# WTF!?!?!?!?! — ISOHaven 2007-10-18 04:37

This is so true! Take Halo 3 for example. As soon as MS is busted for not making Halo 3 HD, what do they do? They come up with a bunch of BS excuses as to why HD isn't really all that important:

"the 360 scales the 'almost-720p' image"

Almost 720 is NOT HD. It certainly isn't even CLOSE to being 1080!

"effortlessly all the way up to 1080p"

As we all know, or just those of us with large screens, scaling is about as useful as a third testicle. Either way, scaling up does NOT making something HD. When the hell is MS going to get it through there THICK HEAD that scaled up sources DOES NOT + HD?!?!?!

"the missing pixels make little to no difference:"

That is an opinion that my 60" screen disagrees with.

In addition, they're just playing with resolution #s. Just because your desktop resolution is 1920X1080, that doesn't mean your machine can handle a true HD video stream. H.264 and HD Audio are all things HD that the 360 can't do in it's space limitation.

As we all know, the 360 does NOT and will NEVER offer REAL HD. It can't. It can't handle it and it doesn't have the space to offer it. MS's pathetic attempt at HD is to SCALE everything up to HD standards then call it HD!!!! What kind of BS is that? I scale ALL my components to 1080p so I guess I have a super exclusive HD Wii that one else has......LAME!!!!! HAHAHA!!!!! Or my HD VCR, there's nothing like watching those HD VHS tapes!!!

Even better!!! My cell phone takes HD MOVIES!!!!!!!!! After all, I can SCALE the video to 1080p!!! Who wants my HD Cell Phone for $1,200? Going......going......GONE!

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