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Random thoughts of a Brit living in the Imperial Valley of California

PS3 Cures Cancer!!

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Well, not quite, but last week version 1.6 of the PS3 firmware trickled out to users and contained the infamous Folding@home application. If you’ve not heard of it, basically it adds your machine to a huge network of computers each running a piece of a simulation that in some way it is hoped will contribute to cures for diseases. The simulations are so huge that it could never be done with just one machine, or even one institution, but perhaps with millions around the world…

Anyway, if you have a PS3 you can enable it to run some folding of its own during its idle moments and therefore feel good about yourself. The interesting thing is the power of the beast as these figures show:

OS Type Current TFLOPS* Active CPUs Total CPUs
Windows 155 162923 1629992
Mac OS X/PowerPC 7 8951 95626
Mac OS X/Intel 10 3136 7804
Linux 43 25549 216507
GPU 46 774 2289
PLAYSTATION®3 403 30788 42346
Total 664 232121 1994564

Now, many of the Windows machines are probably old pieces of junk but the difference between PS3 and Windows performance is huge. Its also beating out the Macs pretty good, too.

Written by admin

March 26th, 2007 at 12:35 pm

Posted in General

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