Buy a PS3 and Help Cure Parkinsons

And lotsa other diseases related to “folded proteins.”  This is so very cool, and an excellent use for a distributed computing architecture.  Users of the PS3 console can allow their systems to join a network of other linked PS3’s during downtime or idle time to assist in the massive computational task of modelling a cure for diseases such as Alzheimers, Huntington’s and many more.

From the AFP here:

Sony announced on Thursday that its PlayStation 3 video game consoles will be enhanced to join a supercomputing network researching causes of cancer, Alzheimer’s and other incurable diseases.
 
The Japanese electronics titan said a software update that will be available by the end of March will enable users to devote their consoles’ idle time to a Stanford University quest for diseases caused by “misfolded” proteins.  Such diseases include Parkinson’s, mad cow, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and some forms of cancer.

PlayStation 3 console software will let users click on a “Folding@home” icon on their television screens to have their machines devote their computing power to medical research whenever games aren’t being played.  The program harnesses idle time of Internet-linked home computers to use the combined power to perform in months protein-folding simulations that would take a single machine decades to complete.

Processors in PlayStation 3 computers are approximately 10 times faster than chips in typical personal computers so adding the consoles to the “folding at home” network should boost simulation speeds, Sony said.

In perhaps the most well known distributed-computing project, researchers at the Berkeley campus of the University of California launched SETI@home in 1999 to help search for messages beamed from space.  More than five million personal computers in countries around the world are combined in a network that uses excess computing power to study radio telescope signals gathered by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Of course, from an information security standpoint, it is ideal to use a gaming platform to perform such massive computing projects rather than enterprise PC’s.  The risk in allowing a networked PC to communicate with an external project, especially one as goofy as SETI is too high.  And though curing diseases is a better use of computing time than analyzing radio waves from space, it is still too risky to allow an enterprise to participate in something like this.  But high powered gaming consoles?  Bravo!  Everyone should participate in this effort.