Our early-rising, slightly less hungover friends at Kotaku beat us to the punch, but Sony has demonstrated a piece of software for the PS3 that will aid in the mapping of protein folding. The software is part of the Folding At Home Project and works like many other existing programs, pooling idle computers together to create supercomputer power.
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.
The cause is good and all, but this is a lot of computing power with problem solving potential that we can utilize in even more worthwhile causes. Two words: spider powers.
