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PS3 Owners To Simulate Gene Folding

Posted by Zonk on Thu Mar 15, 2007 12:20 PM
from the so-far-we-have-not-found-the-science dept.
PlayStation (Games) Science
fistfullast33l writes "According to IGN UK, the next version of Playstation firmware will include a joint venture from Stanford University and Sony called Folding@Home. Similar to the infamous SETI@Home project, Folding@Home will be an idle application that participates in a simulation that 'aims to map the way that genes change shape (or fold), so they can be studied by scientists and, potentially, cure illnesses such as Parkinson's or a variety of cancers.' The application will download a 'work unit' that it will unravel to completion, update Stanford's servers, and then download the next unit and continue." We've previously discussed the client; it will be available as an update at the end of the month, and should appear on your cross-media bar once installed.
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[+] Technology: PS3 Client for Folding@Home Debuts, ATI GPU Version Soon 177 comments
eliot1785 writes "Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable. F@H also announced today that they will release a client capable of running on ATI graphics processors. With these two new developments, F@H hopes to raise the total power of their distributed computing network to 1-10 petaflops. At the upper end of that target, the network would be faster than any current supercomputer, at least in terms of FLOPS." Reader TommyBear points out a collection of papers showing scientific advances made by the F@H researchers.
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  • Who? (Score:5, Funny)

    by patternmatch (951637) on Thursday March 15 2007, @12:22PM (#18364661)
    So who's Gene Folding?
  • Usually you release distributed computing applications on computers which have a large market share... Meh, I'll be doing my part though (when i'm not playing FF-(fill in the blank))

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Seumas (6865)
      So let me get this straight. I pay the energy bill for cycles used to crunch genetic mapping data that will be used by corporations to develop drugs for lifelong treatment (like they'd develop a cure when they could profit more from treatment?) so that when I'm sick, I can pay a few thousand dollars a month to afford the pills?

      Just because the project is managed from a university doesn't mean the project, its goals and it's results are altruistic.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by evilNomad (807119)
        Okay, so save your money, and then when you need the drug you die, too bad..
        • Okay, so save your money, and then when you need the drug you die, too bad..

          Yes... but he'll have won. No corporation is going to get his spare change!

          This is exactly what is wrong with our country today. We are so afraid of someone else winning that we will hurt anyone to stop them.

      • Re:Tis a shame... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by king-manic (409855) on Thursday March 15 2007, @01:58PM (#18365937)
        Academic research has a much greater chance of being widely distributed and public domain then corprate research. So someone will do it eventually. I'd prefer it to be a university who will at least share their findings thena propriatary research group which would hoard their results much tighter.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Hellkitten (574820)

        I pay the energy bill for cycles used to crunch genetic mapping data that will be used by corporations to develop drugs for lifelong treatment (like they'd develop a cure when they could profit more from treatment?) so that when I'm sick, I can pay a few thousand dollars a month to afford the pills?

        For some of us that's not entirely accurate. A large number of homes around the world are heated electrically during winter. All the power you would normally use for electrical heating you could just as well

        • "All the power you would normally use for electrical heating you could just as well run through a computer of some sort (a game console is just a specialized computer). The energy will eventually end up as heat (a cpu is just a special electrical oven that also does computations). Essentially you get the cycles for free (minus minimal wear and tear on the computer) if the computer would just sit idle and you would use that power to heat your home anyway."

          That is a load of crap, ever hear of a heatpump? I h

          • That is a load of crap, ever hear of a heatpump?

            Yep. Ever heard of the cost of it sompared to a basic electrical oven? Unless you actually already have a heatpump installed it doesn't make sense to compare the heat from any electrical appliance to the one you get from a heatpump. The investment literally takes years to recoup from the power savings (this may obviously differ depending on power costs). Where it's cold enough they are ineffective (unless you invest even more and drill down to get that heat

  • Hmm... Folding@Home has been around forever (Score:5, Informative)

    by bad_fx (493443) on Thursday March 15 2007, @12:25PM (#18364711) Journal
    Yet the article and blurb seem to imply that it's a new thing.

    Also, here's the info on the Folding@Home website:

    http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html [stanford.edu]

    • Hmm... Sony pretending that something that's been around forever is something new and exciting because it involves the PS3? Surely you jest!

      (Sorry, sorry, I know, cheap shot. I just couldn't resist.)

      • Eh, I'm still glad to see a company put that out there. It's good work, pure science, and the results aren't "owned" by anyone.

        Definitely makes me think more kindly of Sony...It's obviously a PR scam, but I really don't care...They could have done a lot of different things for PR, and this one will actually do some good.
        • What do you mean? How are the results not "owned" by anyone? The only people who will profit are the pharmaceutical companies. Other scientists may benefit from the use of this data, but in the long run all it does is provide a free pool of data at the user's expense that will ultimately benefit the companies doing research into drugs to treat disease so that they can charge an arm and a leg to keep people alive.

          Curing cancer and other disease is still beneficial to the world, but it's not like this informa

  • Make money this way? (Score:4, Funny)

    by UbuntuDupe (970646) * on Thursday March 15 2007, @12:28PM (#18364757) Journal
    I was thinking recently: if I could get the credit card cycle beginning right, I could defer payment on any electricity I buy for 110 days. (55 days from first day of electricity billing cycle to due date, 55 days from beginning of credit card to its due date.) If I use it steadily for the whole month, that's on average 95 days still, or about a quarter (of a year).

    So, if there were a way to convert electricity into roughly its monetary value, I could put it in a money market account for (on average) 95 days, and then keep the interest that accrued. (5% per year at today's money market rates)

    So, anyone know if you can charge enough for PS3 computing cycles for this to be worth it?

  • Unleash the power... (Score:3, Funny)

    by AmIAnAi (975049) on Thursday March 15 2007, @12:28PM (#18364767)
    Maybe this is the application Sony is looking for to utilise the full power of the PS3.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, this is one of the few types of the computing problems that the Cell would be good at. You have a relatively uniform stream of data that a large number of simple, unchanging operations need to be applied to and generate a relatively small amount of data that can be streamed out without any synchronization. It is perfectly suited to the architecture of the Cell. It's when you have to apply complex operations or have to randomly access a large set of data and do lots of conditional cases or synch
  • I must have missed something, since when is SETI@home infamous?
    • The story of the college IT worker canned for installing it in the labs could maybe be dubbed "infamous".

      We both know they mean famous, but nobody really cares about the difference anymore. Serial killers are hugely popular, because people not only dont know - but dont recognize the difference between fame and infamy.

      I can try to summarize for the sake of education though:

      William Shakespeare: Famous, Adolf Hitler: Infamous.

    • Re:Infamous? (Score:4, Funny)

      by 0racle (667029) on Thursday March 15 2007, @12:50PM (#18365115)
      It's not just famous, its INfamous.

      Might even be the biggest thing to come out of Mexico.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fistfullast33l (819270)
      I wrote the article summary. I probably meant famous but for some reason infamous sounds better in my head. I will point out that maybe SETI@Home can be considered infamous in that so many people used it on their computers and it never really accomplished anything. It was billed as the first large-scale distributed programming project, but it probably was one of the most pointless applications ever. Not to mention I could never understand the interface or believe that you were actually doing anything.

  • Genes don't fold..... (Score:5, Informative)

    by charon_1 (562573) on Thursday March 15 2007, @12:34PM (#18364861)
    proteins do..

    • Re:Genes don't fold..... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Yvan256 (722131) on Thursday March 15 2007, @12:54PM (#18365155) Homepage Journal
      Paper folds too, you know. Unless it gets beaten by scissors.

    • Genes don't fold
      O RLY? "Chromatin" on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] claims that genes fold around histone proteins to form a complex called "chromatin", which is what chromosomes are made of.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by charon_1 (562573)
        That is a completely different type of "folding". Protein folding is incredibly complex: "it takes about a day to simulate a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000 of a second). Unfortunately, proteins fold on the tens of microsecond timescale (10,000 nanoseconds). Thus, it would take 10,000 CPU days to simulate folding -- i.e. it would take 30 CPU years!" Chromatin doesn't "fold" DNA, it just bundles it into compact fibers during mitosis/meiosis. The purpose of chromatin is to bundle DNA into chromosomes and also to
  • So, would I need to leave the PS3 running 24x7 folding@home, racking up $100+ in costs, for this?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Aladrin (926209)
      Yes, and in case that isn't clear enough, you will also overheat your PS3, heat your house to the point that cooling is now necessary, and generally annoy your entire family by screaming 'no, it's folding!' when they want to play PS3.

      Yeah, it somehow doesn't seem like a real great idea.

      Computers seem like a good idea because we geeks tend to leave our computers 24/7 anyhow. Consoles don't get the same treatment, though.
  • Explain to me why SETI is considered "in"famous? from everything I've heard and read, the project was a major breakthrough in multi-computer processing of data, opened up a new way of analyzing data on a massive scale, and even revealed some possible locations in which to begin looking for radio transmissions. Excepting a few debacles with people getting fired from using work computers, how could SETI be considered anything but a complete success?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bigdavex (155746)

      Excepting a few debacles with people getting fired from using work computers, how could SETI be considered anything but a complete success?

      They haven't found any aliens.

      I think your other statements are spot on, but there it is.

    • How many results has it produced? How many aliens have we verified the existence of? How many areas of the known universe can we say are probable to contain extra-terrestrial life?

      None.

      While there was tremendous success in the technical aspects of the project, there has been absolutely no success in the actual goal.

      I'm sure any tea-totaler would count the project as a loss so far, but most people with any scientific background understand that there have been many benefits from the project that were not an
      • Well, in seeing the scope of the data to be analyzed, one would not expect to be finding anything this early. Yet, in fact, SETI has revealed quite a few possible sources to look into further. The fact that it's recovered anything at all is pretty remarkable, if you ask me. I don't think they were expecting to find ANYTHING this soon, so it has past expectation.
      • Exactly. The problem is that SETI is a long shot.

        When you participate in gene-folding, or protein-folding (as in the Baker Labs at the University of Washington [washington.edu], which win year after year in best predictions), you know that it's going to useful research that actually helps us understand how things actually work.

        Nothing against SETI - I did many packets for them back in the day.

        But, practically, it's more fun to do something like cure cancer (UK site) or fold proteins (UW - search for Baker Labs in Biochemist

  • ...but the numbers keep on circling me [lyricsdepot.com].

    Just a little help for those who were wondering what the department's name was all about.

  • Stupid question maybe, but why would this be distributed as a firmware update and not as a downloadable 'game' from the Playstation(R)Network Store?

    I can understand (and have commented before on the need for) a firmware update to add 'applications' or some such option to the XMB for non-game software, but I can't see that the software itself should require this distribution method.

    Anyone able to shed light on this?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by tapo (855172)
      I assume to get it on as many machines as possible. This also isn't the only new feature in the March 23rd update, other things - like background downloading - will also be implemented.
  • Maybe they can use this massive amount of distributed processing power to come up with a game worth playing.

    Really, really. It's the games. Home might be nifty (although also microtransactiony) and this might be a good idea, but neither of these are going to move systems. I get the feeling Sony's treading water, hoping for something to pop up.
  • Why was the SETI@Home project "infamous"? What did it do that was evil or malicious?

    These isn't even a malapropism because you didn't use it to mean "not famous" as most do. Why don't people proofread a single paragraph that goes to millions? (I'll never no...oops, I mean "know")

  • A a good game for the Ps3...heheheh

    I kid I kid
  • Wake me when my PS3 can fold all my laundry. I don't even have that many jeans, anyway.
  • Cause if it isn't... I imagine there'll be a huge backlash when people notice their PS3 is constantly drawing 0.4kW whenever it's on.
  • I thought Folding@Home was bad because they do work for large private companies. So basically you are doing their work for them, and they get all the $$$.
  • The PS3 sucks too much power for me to be part of any @Home program. Since I've had my PS3 hooked up (November) I've let it idly on at times, and other times turned off. That's how I've operated my frequently played video game systems my whole life. If I've just finished a game of basketball, maybe I want to leave it on the screen where I can come back later and have a rematch, or maybe I want to pause my game when I get to a boss and pick it up the next day... Well, treating my PS3 like this has resulte

  • Alright, we have phong shading, but at least some specular bloom [stanford.edu]. Folding@home are taking their first steps into next-generation graphics [vgcats.com]!

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