Sony Studies Commercial PS3 Supercomputing Grid

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Sony is currently kicking around the idea of offering product discounts and other incentives to PlayStation 3 owners that use their consoles to be part of a supercomputing grid for research.

Unlike Folding@home, this would be a commercial venture, so there's no appealing to customers' charitable side. As incentives, Sony is considering discounts on products, such as the PS3 and accessories. Sony would wrap this cost into the overall price it would charge to companies seeking to use the grid.
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Folding for products and discounts is cool and all but I prefer that my PS3 folds for Team #33. Any time it is not being used for gaming, it just sits there folding its little heart out, 24 hours a day.
 
I'm not suprised at all by this. It just makes sense when your product alone accounts for ~50% of the current computing power of F@H would try to do something profitable with it.

However, the biggest concern will be stopping people from "hacking" free gifts/discounts.
 
How could Sony guarantee corporate espionage of some sort or purposeful corruption of data wouldn't happen?
 
Espionage can't really occur when each device is only processing .0001% of the data.
Purposeful corruption can't really occur if data is processed more then once.
 
Sony is doing the strangest things with the PS3 this time around.
 
I don't know about this. These corporations have tons of money why coudn't they simply buy 10000 PS3s and do that themselves? It just makes much more sense to me.
 
syntx said:
I don't know about this. These corporations have tons of money why coudn't they simply buy 10000 PS3s and do that themselves? It just makes much more sense to me.
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Because if your company needs 2-3 hours of super computer time every month it makes no sense to spend several million dollars on development of one.
 
This is awesome. I see a lot of potential in this especially if Sony can integrate the cluster software in their consoles with an update, it would make for a very scalable highly capable cluster.

And the price of the consoles would make them dispensable.


I hope sony see's value in this and I hope it works out good for them.
 
If they can find a way to help cover for one half to one quarter the cost of a PS3 of a span of time then I'd seriously consider it, however I doubt they'll offer much. It's a pretty good move for Sony as a way to cover their loss on the PS3 as a gaming console.
 
I wonder if Sony is going to also inform general consumers about the power used by the PS3 when running full time. Folding is great if it gives people a warm-fuzzy for donating something to the greater good, including the extra cost of power as necessary. But for a commercial venture, I'd like to know that my benefit outweighs my cost.
 
syntx said:
I don't know about this. These corporations have tons of money why coudn't they simply buy 10000 PS3s and do that themselves? It just makes much more sense to me.
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because sony can charge them alot of money to use the millions of ps3's out there, and all sony has to do is throw a few nickles to the consumers.
 
Why not offer online services for free for those who fold with their PS3 for X amound of hrs a month?
 
There are a lot of ways they could work this.

Credit-by-the-hour that can go towards games and accessories seems like the simplest thing to do to me.
 
msummers80 said:
I wonder if Sony is going to also inform general consumers about the power used by the PS3 when running full time. Folding is great if it gives people a warm-fuzzy for donating something to the greater good, including the extra cost of power as necessary. But for a commercial venture, I'd like to know that my benefit outweighs my cost.
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Not all, but alot of people are sheep and they are dumb. If a PS3 running 24/7 at 200W (measured for F@H) )for a grid type program @ $0.10/kWh = $175/year :eek: A sucker is born every day IMO....Sony may have found a million of them....
 
How would they ensure that people who took the discount would leave their PS3 powered on for a satisfactory amount of time?
 
Very interesting, Sony was talking about cell based distributed compuiting before the PS3 came out. I thought it was never going to happen, then F@H and and now this.
 
must... run... F@H at retail locations...

FOLD ON! i shall run every PS3 i come across for #33 :D
 
Sgraffite said:
How would they ensure that people who took the discount would leave their PS3 powered on for a satisfactory amount of time?
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I don't think they can really. But what they COULD do is offer discounts on games/merchandise based on how much time you leave it on.
 
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