Folding@Home: PS3s beating all other platforms combined

A couple of days ago, Sony released version 1.6 of the PS3 software, which included the ability to run the Folding@Home client. Folding@Home is a project run by Stanford university that uses the combined power of thousands of computers to perform calculations that would otherwise take expensive supercomputers months or even years to complete. The data is part of research on curing diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s (more information can be found in this CNN article). The amazing thing is that since the PS3 has been added to the mix, it has quickly pulled ahead of all other platforms. As of this writing, it had almost twice as many TFLOPS as all of the other platforms combined. That’s about 19,000 PS3s beating out about 200,000 other computers! I’m currently letting my PS3 fold when it’s not in use and I suggest anyone who has one do the same.

EDIT: Just to be fair, it has been pointed out to me that the PS3 and PC clients aren’t doing precisely the same thing. The PS3 is a lot faster than the PC at the work that it is being given, but the PC is doing some calculations that the PS3 can’t do.