Sony and Folding@Home Announce Cure@PS3

Your PS3 may one day save lives.

We’ve told you before about the Stanford University chemistry department’s Folding@Home (FAH) distributed computing project that turns your PC into a part-time medical research computer for analyzing proteins. (Yes, we at QJ also take time to worry and care about the bigger picture, so some of us have donated our own computers to the project.) Now FAH wants to enlist the computing and graphics power of the next-gen PlayStation in its research of proteins and diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and certain forms of cancer.

Sony will be providing software that will turn your personal gaming console into a client computer of the FAH project. While the Cell microprocessor crunches the chemistry, the graphics chip displays the actual folding process of the protein molecule in real-time – a first for FAH. If your curiosity gets the better of you – or you happen to be interested in medical chemistry – you can navigate the 3D space of the simulated molecule using your PS3 controller.

So far Sony has demoed the software recently in Germany, and FAH is conducting internal beta tests. They will most likely announce an open beta test sometime in September.

Maybe the guys at Stanford were as impressed with the Cell as these guys were. And they’ve decided to put it to good use – other than as a gaming processor, anyways.

We’ll probably hear more of this when the PS3’s finally released and good-hearted games everywhere decide to donate their console’s “down” time to the greater good of mankind.

Your PS3 may one day save lives.

We’ve told you before about the Stanford University chemistry department’s Folding@Home (FAH) distributed computing project that turns your PC into a part-time medical research computer for analyzing proteins. (Yes, we at QJ also take time to worry and care about the bigger picture, so some of us have donated our own computers to the project.) Now FAH wants to enlist the computing and graphics power of the next-gen PlayStation in its research of proteins and diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and certain forms of cancer.

Sony will be providing software that will turn your personal gaming console into a client computer of the FAH project. While the Cell microprocessor crunches the chemistry, the graphics chip displays the actual folding process of the protein molecule in real-time – a first for FAH. If your curiosity gets the better of you – or you happen to be interested in medical chemistry – you can navigate the 3D space of the simulated molecule using your PS3 controller.

So far Sony has demoed the software recently in Germany, and FAH is conducting internal beta tests. They will most likely announce an open beta test sometime in September.

Maybe the guys at Stanford were as impressed with the Cell as these guys were. And they’ve decided to put it to good use – other than as a gaming processor, anyways.

We’ll probably hear more of this when the PS3’s finally released and good-hearted games everywhere decide to donate their console’s “down” time to the greater good of mankind.