PS3 Cures Cancer!!
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.