ImJasonH.com
Breaking: PS3 Folding: PS3 Triples Folding At Home’s Computing Power to Over 500 TFLOPS..PFLOPS in Spitting Range
This is freaking amazing. I was checking out some message boards last night on the Folding Forums, at Stanford, and discovered that a small legion of 13,000 PS3s are running the Folding at Home app, yet accounting for about 56 percent of the computing power in the project (PS3s = 316 measured TFLOPS). On average between the super fast and super slow PCs, 159,033 PCs are only doing about half that much. (151 TFLOPS). Essentially, 13,000 PS3s have just made the Folding at Home Project the fastest distributed computing project ever. (I believe it used to be SETI @ Home, was something like 280 TFLOPS.)
This also means the PS3 met Stanford professor Vijay Pande’s expected 1-month goal in one day. (We’ll update this post with confirmation once Dr. Pande gets back to us.)
The project just needs about 18,000 more PS3s folding to make the Folding at Home project the first distributed computing project to hit a Petabyte. For comparison Japanese research computer MDGRAPE-3, RIKEN’s supercomputer, has about a Petabyte of computing power.
And the potential goes on from there. I think there are 2 million PS3s in the wild, yes? And over 100 million PS2s eventually shipped. PS3 owners, what are you waiting for? Get the word out to other PS3 owners. Let’s help cure Alzheimer’s.–Brian Lam
P.S. I’m sure there are CS majors out there who can fact check this post. Post your updates in the comments.
Folding at Home Stats by OS [Stanford]
PS3 Folding [Gizmodo]