Folding @ Home Petaflop Barrier Crossed

The official PlayStation blog is reporting that the petaflop barrier has been crossed by the nodes participating in the Folding @ Home project. The article talks about what this means for computer science, and why this awesome amount of computational power was reachable. "Just six months after we launched the program, nearly 600,000 PS3 users have registered. Second, we made several improvements to the application (v 1.2) that helped make the computations more accurate and enabled us to squeeze even more work out of each and every PS3 console -- we went from 450 teraflops to 800 teraflops. These factors, combined with the contribution from all the other platforms, helped us cross the barrier, which happened sometime over the weekend."

Re:Sweet! Protein Folding is a great use for PS3s

[Trogre]

It's only wasted power if you don't want the heat. If you live in a cold climate you've got yourself a perfect small heater with a COP of 1. So your thermostat-controlled heater won't need to work quite as hard to maintain your room at the target temperature, so you break even energy-wise and effectively get your F@H flops for free.

Of course if you're in a hot climate and want to cool the room, well the opposite is true. You're wasting more power (200W to do the F@H work, and 200W/COP for the A/C unit to shift the heat out of your room).

Re:Systems issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the forums. FAH's 'core' actually runs completely in assembly, this will push your system to the limit, shouldn't crash it out though. If you're blocking air vents while running FAH, you will have problems. Maybe you're overheating. Try the forums though http://forum.folding-community.org/ [folding-community.org]

Re:EULA

[eosp]

Hint on the grocery discount thing: ask for a new card ("oh, I just moved here") then just toss the card on the way out. Or just give it back after they scan it.