GOVERNMENT
PS3 to Help Cure Alzheimer's and Cancer
Scientists are planning on building a Grid from idle PlayStation 3 consoles sitting in gamers' homes to tackle and help understand diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. The application has been created by biologists at Folding@Home, who already run a series of research projects using PCs across the globe. 
In Germany, Sony demoed their Folding@Home client for the PS3. Using the Cell processor of the PS3, they should be able to do more folding than what one could do on a PC. Also, since the PS3 has a powerful GPU, the PS3 client will offer real time visualization for the first time. The PS3 client and GPU client are together part of our new broader goals to push Folding@Home to the next stage, reaching calculations on the petaflop to 10 petaflop scale. They have some preliminary details on the Folding@Home Petaflop Initiative (FPI). They will release more details on all of this as the new software rolls out. They are beta testing the ATI GPU client software internally at the moment and will likely announce an open beta in four to five weeks (end of September). Gamers will be able to download the application directly to the console, that uses their PS3's processing power when they aren't battling the forces of evil. The application will then crunch small packets of data before sending it back over the internet to a central computer where all of the results can be viewed together by Biologists. The organization has said that a network of 10,000 PS3 boxes would enable processing performance four times as fast as the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the IBM BlueGene/L. Sony has announced that it is expecting to sell 12 million consoles in the first year alone and if the next-generation console goes as far as selling as many as the company's current PlayStation 2 console, the supercomputing network could be as large as 100 million machines offering processing time.
In Germany, Sony demoed their Folding@Home client for the PS3. Using the Cell processor of the PS3, they should be able to do more folding than what one could do on a PC. Also, since the PS3 has a powerful GPU, the PS3 client will offer real time visualization for the first time. The PS3 client and GPU client are together part of our new broader goals to push Folding@Home to the next stage, reaching calculations on the petaflop to 10 petaflop scale. They have some preliminary details on the Folding@Home Petaflop Initiative (FPI). They will release more details on all of this as the new software rolls out. They are beta testing the ATI GPU client software internally at the moment and will likely announce an open beta in four to five weeks (end of September). Gamers will be able to download the application directly to the console, that uses their PS3's processing power when they aren't battling the forces of evil. The application will then crunch small packets of data before sending it back over the internet to a central computer where all of the results can be viewed together by Biologists. The organization has said that a network of 10,000 PS3 boxes would enable processing performance four times as fast as the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the IBM BlueGene/L. Sony has announced that it is expecting to sell 12 million consoles in the first year alone and if the next-generation console goes as far as selling as many as the company's current PlayStation 2 console, the supercomputing network could be as large as 100 million machines offering processing time.