Folding@Home Update: PS3 Accelerant

At the end of last month, I posted about Folding@Home, a SETI-like bit of software that allows your idle PS3’s Cell processor to assist Stanford researchers in their study of protein folding. Well, it looks like the initiative has continued from it’s roaring start, and it’s now estimated that over 250,000 PS3 users have now participated, accelerating the study faster than Stanford’s own bank of computers (already augmented by hundreds of thousands of home PCs running the software), could ever imagine. If you have a PS3, and are not participating in Folding@Home, I’d like to shove you almost gently in that direction. Put that big plastic machine to excellent use when you’re not busy blowing things up. Who knows, future generations may thank you.
The project has a long way to go yet before it reaches SETI’s level of over 3 million users, but the results have to be encouraging for the Stanford team, and other research institutes that may be considering similar community-based computations.