That's really cool, not gonna lie. I'll have to fire mine up for that more often when I move into my place. Kind of impractical at my current place, though.
It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle where people and their machines get an area to solve. Alone, the finished product is jibberish. Combined together, it could save lives.
Folding@Home is a project based out of Stanford. The goal of the project is ""to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases." Basically, with this sort of research, they can better understand the development of diseases like Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, Parkinson's, certain types of cancer, and other diseases, which would hopefully lead to better treatment for those affected by these diseases. Rather than setting up a cluster of computers to do the computations required for this sort of thing, they've set it up so that anyone can contribute to the project, assuming they have a PC or a PS3. You download their client, and then run it whenever the machine is not in use (or run it in the background while you browse the web and/or listen to music). While not perfect, this allows them to work with hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of computers, which would not have been possible otherwise. Even if it was possible, the costs to build a system like that would have been insane. This is sort of the idea behind distrubuted computing. This PR is pointing out that 1M PS3 users have downloaded and run the Folding@Home client on their PS3s, which is a major accomplishment for them. It also points out the performance gains they've made since putting out a PS3 client a little less than a year ago (the PS3's processor works great for stuff like this). Basically, thanks to all the users running this on their PS3s and/or PCs, they've been able to use a large amount of processing power for the project (as the PR says, it is the most powerful computing network of its kind), allowing them to get a lot more work done in a shorter amount of time ("have the ability to perform research simulations in weeks rather than years").
Thanks for posting this, RC. I've been meaning to join up for a while now. It's probably the easiest chairity you can do. I joined the team as Xerobull.
I don't have a PS3, but I've been folding all the clothes after my wife asks me to fold them coming out of the dryer. I think all my folding at home has gone to waste, when I could have contributed. I have many clothes. How can I help?
