Generous natured PS3 owners who have signed up (now more than 250,000!) for the Folding@home Program has advanced the programs research hugely, Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) and Stanford University have reported.

PS3 have more than doubled the programs computing capacity, delivering nearly 400 teraflops, bringing the total computing power to over 700 teraflops at a single moment.

Tomorrow (April 26) SCE will provide an application update that will further enhance the user experience, improving calculation speeds, increased visibility of user location on the globe, and the ability for users to create longer donor or team names.

“The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward”, said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead.

“Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate. We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer’s and other diseases.”

Folding@home was launched in March and relies on the power of the PS3 while idle to calculate protein folding, mis-folding and the related diseases, and has become one of the most powerful distributed computing networks in the world.

“We continue to be thrilled with the ongoing contributions of the PS3 user community in helping the Folding@home program study the causes of many different diseases that afflict our society”, said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

“As we move forward, we are issuing a call to action for all PS3 owners around the world to download the Folding@home application and help this cause. These PS3 fans can also be part of history as the Folding@home distributed computing program inches closer to achieving a petaflop – a measure of computing power that has never before been reached.”

>> Read - 30,000 plus PS3 gamers sign up for Folding@home