Folding@home saves the world (via PlayStation 3)

More positive news for the ps3!

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Folding@home saves the world (via PlayStation 3) March 23rd
Posted Mar 15th 2007 12:26PM by Christopher Grant
Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/03/15/folding-...n-3-march-23rd/

Coupled with some glowing press about the admittedly impressive specs of the PlayStation 3's Cell processor comes news that the console's long promised Folding@home client will be using all those leftover processing cycles on March 23rd. The distributed computing project, whose PS3 partnership was detailed in an event at Stanford University this morning, will be accessible within the Network menu of the XrossMediaBar.

Why bother donating all that computing power (not to mention electricity) to "help study the causes of diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis and many cancers?" If you're not in it for the altruism (and we're talking serious good karma here), then at least you'll be able to enjoy watching the protein folding happen in real-time, and manipulate the presentation using the Sixaxis. Somewhere, a slightly disgruntled Will Wright is wondering when Sony's going to donate all that unused processing power to a SETI@home client.


Here are some videos and info from the Stanford University press conference today:

"Yes, and the PS3 is going to make a big impact. According to that chart, from the Folding at Home by OS stats:
1 Gigaflop per PC
3 Gigaflops per Intel Mac
30 Gigaflops of Folding Power per PS3"

"On average, of course. A researcher I spoke to said that the basis for the 30x folding power, a very math intense process, is a $1000 PC you'd buy today. Impressive. Since the Tflop rating is the capable power, measured by units per time, the 826 PS3s doing Folding in beta are already doing 1/6 the processing of all the active Folding PCs out there, over 155k of them."

Yeay, I want to burn more power in my home to do absolutely nothing but probably fry a PS3 in the process. Hummm, more money for electric and a dead PS3 due to folding = priceless.

ServerKing said:

Yeay, I want to burn more power in my home to do absolutely nothing but probably fry a PS3 in the process. Hummm, more money for electric and a dead PS3 due to folding = priceless.

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Help the [H]orde build up their lead so that we dont have to worry about those pesky roos over the summer, though they might not be much of a problem anymore. Also the [H] is close to overtaking Google and becoming second overall, to only the default Anonymous team.

ServerKing said:

Yeay, I want to burn more power in my home to do absolutely nothing but probably fry a PS3 in the process. Hummm, more money for electric and a dead PS3 due to folding = priceless.

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So that also applies to everyone who folds on PCs as well.

ServerKing said:

Yeay, I want to burn more power in my home to do absolutely nothing but probably fry a PS3 in the process. Hummm, more money for electric and a dead PS3 due to folding = priceless.

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maybe it will burn up your ego and ignorance as well.

burn my ego nah, go waste ur energy pc or ps3 for folding when nothing really comes of it. its just a pipe dream people thinking this will help find ufos or a cure for cancer lol

ServerKing said:

burn my ego nah, go waste ur energy pc or ps3 for folding when nothing really comes of it. its just a pipe dream people thinking this will help find ufos or a cure for cancer lol

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ur lik the smrtest guy in tha forums lol.

oh no i wassted my lectricities makin this post omg i gotta prss the pwr buttin!!1

Neat stuff.

The PS3 client will also support some advanced visualization features. While the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PLAYSTATION 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering. It is possible to navigate the 3D space of the molecule using the interactive controller of the PS3, allowing us to look at the protein from different angles in real-time.

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http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html
http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/070315e.pdf

folding and running linux are the two main attraction points for me concerning the PS3 ..not really games lol


[F]old|[H]ard

ServerKing said:

burn my ego nah, go waste ur energy pc or ps3 for folding when nothing really comes of it. its just a pipe dream people thinking this will help find ufos or a cure for cancer lol

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so if you get cancer (hopefully not) and folding helps find a cure, we can write you down as not needing any treatment with the cure, since its meaningless and a pipe dream?

ServerKing said:

burn my ego nah, go waste ur energy pc or ps3 for folding when nothing really comes of it. its just a pipe dream people thinking this will help find ufos or a cure for cancer lol

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people told the wright brothers nothing would come of flying and its just a pipe dream

help cure cystic fibrosis! i have that shit and it sucks!

How does PS3 folding stack up to the R580 folding abilities? if I get a PS3 (which might be soon) and it can get close to the numbers my X1900 puts off, then I'd rather use that and turn my PC off during the day

Trimlock said:

How does PS3 folding stack up to the R580 folding abilities? if I get a PS3 (which might be soon) and it can get close to the numbers my X1900 puts off, then I'd rather use that and turn my PC off during the day

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Im interested in seeing some numbers too, since the firmware isnt until next thursday, i guess we may have a hard time finding a comparison. Im sure ill leave mine on for a day or two just to see the results.

This is neat, but the numbers are absolutely ridiculous. Why the hell would an intel mac have three times more gigaflops of folding power than a PC, 70% of which also use Intel processors? And I'm really not seeing how you would have 30x the performance on PS3 when compared to a PC. That's just nuts.

PWMK2 said:

This is neat, but the numbers are absolutely ridiculous. Why the hell would an intel mac have three times more gigaflops of folding power than a PC, 70% of which also use Intel processors? And I'm really not seeing how you would have 30x the performance on PS3 when compared to a PC. That's just nuts.

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well the ps3 does kinda have 6 or 7 cpuish thing in it and they might have optimized the core intructions to be very good at the math required for folding

PWMK2 said:

This is neat, but the numbers are absolutely ridiculous. Why the hell would an intel mac have three times more gigaflops of folding power than a PC, 70% of which also use Intel processors? And I'm really not seeing how you would have 30x the performance on PS3 when compared to a PC. That's just nuts.

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Its averaged out. More PCs than Macs folding (many of which fold on P3/P4/K7) and all the current Macs have Core 2 Duos...therefore it averages out to more.

Did you see the crazy visuals the PS3 has? jesus.

Riddlinkidstoner said:

Its averaged out. More PCs than Macs folding (many of which fold on P3/P4/K7) and all the current Macs have Core 2 Duos...therefore it averages out to more.

Did you see the crazy visuals the PS3 has? jesus.

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But all the "current" PCs also have Core 2 Duos.

It's misleading. Yes, PCs will have less performance when compared to Macs that also happen to have a superior CPU. And I'm still not buying the numbers for the PS3 version, even with its crazy 7 CPUs or whatever.

As for the crazy visuals, that doesn't mean it's putting out 30 GFLOPS. Tons of PCs could match anything the PS3 puts out.

The PC power calculated at top is the CPU power, nothing there is from video cards. As I understand, the ATI video cards are many many times more powerful than even Core 2 CPUs. Lastly, we may never get a real comparison of the Cell vs ATI because the client probably won't tell you much nor will you be able to put your folding or team number in it to further extending your [h]orde epenis.

PWMK2 said:

But all the "current" PCs also have Core 2 Duos.

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LOL maybe for us...but the majority of the computers I see sold still contain Pentium D's and single core Athlons...and celerons if your really strapped for cash. However, all the new macs have Core2Duos and it seems more people are buying macs now than ever just because of that.

Im going on a hunch here but is the PS3 better for folding because it uses a vector processor? I was always under the impression that the cell would be good for these kind of calculations.

Regardless I think its a great thing that Sony is allowing the F@Home guys to do this.

Michael.R said:

Im going on a hunch here but is the PS3 better for folding because it uses a vector processor? I was always under the impression that the cell would be good for these kind of calculations.

Regardless I think its a great thing that Sony is allowing the F@Home guys to do this.

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Yeah, well, they need all the PR points they can get since they have been such total asshats lately.