14 DAY TRIAL // After the Friday report made by The Inquirer, Gizmodo writes about the previously blamed PS3 that now is said to 'save the world', as the Folding@home, a distributed computing network which studies protein folding and protein folding disease, will be running on the console as a software meant to map the protein folding, lending a hand in the global research regarding cancer, Alzheimer and many other diseases.
Strangely enough, the project is named 'Folding At Home' instead of The Inquirer's 'Cure@PS3'. "A standard PC working alone would take a day to simulate 1 billionth of a second of protein folding. But scientists believe that 10,000 idle PS3s can be four times faster than IBM's BlueGene/L System, which cranks out 280.6 trillion calculations per second. And if Sony could actually sell the PS3 with as much success as the PS2, imagine what 100 million units could do," writes Gizmodo.
The Folding@home representatives said on Friday that the company expects to reach an overall performance of about 100 gigaflops per console because of PS3's cell processor, and a petaflop at about 10.000 consoles. The officials added that by using the processing power offered by the PS3, the program will benefit from a greater appreciation and of new capabilities that will facilitate the further study of several diseases such as the Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease, and numerous forms of cancer.
"The PS3 Folding@home client will also support some advanced visualization features. While the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the Nvidia supplied RSX graphics chip of the console displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering. It's even possible to navigate the 3D space of the molecule using the interactive controller of the PS3, allowing users to look at the protein from different angles in real-time," informed The Inquirer.