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."

Sure... it's awsome for this...

[gmezero]

There aren't any games, so it's just sitting there doing nothing anyways. Might as well burn cycles on something useful.

Granted that could change once there is more compelling content around, but until then, fold away.

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

[trdrstv]

Now, until they come up with a way to use my Wii to fold proteins (and Dr. Baker has a great lab doing that here at the UW), I'll just use it to play Wii Sims instead.

On a processor level, I must admit the literal hardware of the PS3 is vastly more suited for the calculations involved in folding proteins, so it might be a while, even if there are many more Wii systems being sold.

Agreed. Since the Wii was actually designed to be left on 24/7 I think it would be a great candidate despite being a slower machine.

Not to discredit what Sony has done however. In a year of Stupid decisions, this is one of the shinning examples of a good idea that floated to the top. I hope they encourage its' use by setting milestones (100 WU, 500 WU, 1000 WU etc...) and offer Trophys in Home.

I've only had a PS3 for about 1 month and I keep it on pretty consistantly to fold. About once a week I give it "the night off" (since that system fan is spinning constantly). Since I noticed the Background downloads still work while folding I got to thinking that even when using the system Folding could take please (even at a slower rate). I have a 60 gig PS3 with the EE chip. When playing a PS2 game it is using that chip to play the game so the Cell would be practically dormant. Why not let it "background fold" ? How about a DVD, or a BluRay movie? Playing music of the HDD?

I can't imagine anything shy of a PS3 game (and a big one at that) would be running the Cell full tilt, so why not Add a "Folding@Home" option in system settings and let me chose to add it as a background task?

Re:Sure... it's awsome for this...

[edmudama]

you do realize that with the power consumption of a PS3, your folding is spending a few dollars a month right?

Re:Sure... it's awsome for this...

[Seumas]

Sorry, but my PS3 isn't being spent on energy-bill-increasing cycles to benefit drug companies.

Barrier?

[UNFAIRMAN]

Dear Slashdot editors,
Its a milestone not a barrier. The 640k memory limit on PCs was a barrier. Going faster than the speed of sound was a barrier. A barrier requires technical challenges to be met to move beyond a specific maximum point. A milestone is significant only in artificial numeric terms, such as reaching a percentage of a goal, or achieving a number of ops per sec that happens to be divisible by 2^10.

Its still quite newsworthy and very cool, but it isn't a broken barrier.

Active CPU's

[vasqzr]

For the cell, they took the # of PS3's and multiplied it by 8 to get # of active CPU's. Shouldn't they have multiplied by 6, since one isn't active and one is reserved?