PS3 joins medical research program

Stanford University urges gamers to help in battle against diseases

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NEWS: 16 March 2007 10:50 GMT by Chris Ford

It appears that the PS3 won’t only be good for gaming, but medical research as well as Sony have announced that the PS3 will have the capability to connect to Stanford University’s Folding@home program.

The program is a distributed computing project to understand protein folding, misfolding and related diseases, and is due to start at the end of March when the Folding@home icon will be added to the Network menu of the XMB (XrossMediaBar).

The idea is that Folding@home will use the PS3 to help study the causes of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and many cancers.

The Cell/B.E. processor inside each PS3 is about 10 times faster than a standard mainstream chip inside a PC, so researchers hope to harness consoles all over the world to perform the simulations faster.

The process of folding proteins is so complex that computers are used to perform simulations to study the process, something that can take up to 30 years for a single computer, so Folding@home uses the power of thousands of computers connected via the network.

“Millions of users have experienced the power of PS3 entertainment. Now they can utilize that exceptional computing power to help fight diseases”, said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

“In order to study protein folding, researchers need more than just one super computer, but the massive processing power of thousands of networked computers. Previously, PCs have been the only option for scientists, but now, they have a new, more powerful tool — PS3.”

“We’re thrilled to have SCE be part of the Folding@home project”, said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead.

“With PS3 now part of our network, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world’s most life-threatening diseases.”