Improved visibility of donor locations on the globe, folding calculation speed and protein viewing

Apr 26, 2007 09:47 GMT  ·  By

Sony's dedicated their console to help curing diseases, with the aid of PS3 owners clicking on the Folding@home icon in the PS3 CrossMediaBar (XMB), thus letting their consoles work in the name of science. Idle time from 250.000 users has been used for folding protein for the past month (since the app was launched). Eurogamer reports that "Stanford University's research is currently using a computing power of 700 teraflops in a single moment, 400 of which are delivered by PS3 owners."

What exactly is a moment anyway? A second? A fraction of a second? Whatever... The application has recently been updated to version 1.1, with improved visibility of donor locations on the globe, folding calculation speed and protein viewing.

Vijay Pande, associate professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead comments: "The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward. 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."

You can download the new update for the software right away, after which you can click on the Folding@home icon, to continue what 250.000 of you have started in the name of curing diseases like Alzheimer's and different forms of cancer. When idle of course, nobody would want you away from Motorstorm.