Sony's Folding@home project gets Guinness record

PlayStation 3 users have been able to connect their consoles online to Stanford University's Folding@home project, allowing researchers to tap into the machines' substantial processing power as they study the effects of a process called protein folding on a series of serious diseases.

(Credit: Folding@home)

It's a small thing, but Sony got some good news today related to its troubled PlayStation 3 video game console. In fact, the system helped set a new Guinness World Record.

The record was set by Stanford University's Folding@home project, a distributed computing system utilizing PS3s among other computers, to help scientists study the effects of a process called "protein folding" on a series of serious diseases.

Well, Guinness has apparently certified the project as the world's most powerful distributed computing system. According to a release from Sony, Folding@home topped 1 petaflop last month, meaning that it surpassed a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. By comparison, the well-known SETI@home project has topped out, according to Wikipedia, at around 265 teraflops, or 265 trillion floating point operations a second.

What has Sony excited is that it seems that much of the computing power behind Folding@home comes from the excess cycles of many hundreds of thousands of PS3 users' consoles. More than 600,000 PS3 users have signed up to be part of the project, the company says.

Any Guinness record is cool, of course, and Sony is probably very happy to have some good news come out of the PS3 program, since the much-ballyhooed console has struggled in its first year on the market and still finds itself in third place in the next-generation console wars behind Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii.

But while those machines may be outselling the PS3, neither can lay claim to a Guinness world record that reflects an attempt to help out with real science.

And though that may not translate into huge sales for Sony, at least it's some great PR spin fodder.

[Spartan_458]

They need an Xbox 360 client.

Then we'll see which would set the record. For the record, there are 7.1 million Xbox live users, which I'd guess that at least 2 or 3 million are 360s. I think that Stanford would only stand to gain with a 360 client.

[Draven71]

XBox 360 can't do this project.

Back when this project came out the folks at Stanford went to Microsoft to get XBox on board and they found out that the XBox 360 couldn't handle the processing it takes to do the folding. Doesn't sound like that is true but that's what was said in Stanford University's press release. Sucks cause having both systems crunch numbers would be really helpful.

[nitin213]

XBOX 36 client.......maybe not

you see the xbox client actually will not beat the PS3 juggernaut on the folding project. 2 reasons -
1. Cell is a bit more powerful than falcon..
2. and frankly who am i fooling... u wud spend more time playing on xbox360 today than PS3... so net net PS3 has more time sitting idle processing the folding projet than the xbox360

Smart choice by Stanford nonetheless.

[boeush]

Then again.... maybe yes

If each box can provide only 1 gigaFLOP of sustained performance (which, by *modern* PC standards, is not really that much), and you hook up just 1 million boxes to the network, then just those boxes alone will add up to 1 petaFLOP of potential. With ~3 million XBOX 360s out there in the U.S. alone, only ~30% of them need to be loaded up with the software and online at any given time, to double the Guinness world record...

[BrianC6234]

The PS3 isn't doing that bad really

It's more the media bashing the PS3 than the PS3 doing poorly. It isn't doing any different than the PS2 did its first year. Now that the big PS3 games are coming out Nintendo and Microsoft better watch out. 2008 will be the year of the PS3. You heard it here first.

[sammyspam]

I recently discovered this on http://www.squidoo.com/folding-at-home and it lead me here, ive started using this and its great.

Im going to start running this all the time now, now my PS3 feels even more useful. Im happy its being used for a good cause.