How can a PlayStation 3 donate its processing power to medical research?
In September 2006, news agencies reported that Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation wasn’t just for fun and games. Sony and Stanford University’s Folding@home project had created a distributed computing application for the game console. With Folding@home, PlayStation 3 owners will be able to donate their consoles’ processing power to scientific research. Computer users may already be familiar with distributed computing. Distributed computing applications break huge processing tasks into smaller chunks. Lots of home computers then process the data simultaneously. One such application, SETI@home , became a popular screensaver after its debut in 1999. SETI@home allows idle computers to process data from radio telescopes. Folding@home is similar to SETI@ home, and it allows scientists to study protein folding , or protein assembly. Incorrectly-folded proteins can cause serious illnesses, so scientists hope to simulate exactly how the process takes place. One computer’s processing power isn’t eno
