In December I was looking for something positive to write about Sony because it seemed almost everything being written about them was negative including the lackluster PS3 launch. This morning I found one thing the PS3 is doing well at — distributed computing via Folding@home — thanks to Coding Horror:

The Playstation 3 is indeed dominating the charts; as of this writing, the PS3 is responsible for a whopping 72 percent of the computing power in the entire Folding@Home project. It’s only a matter of time– a few weeks at most– before the PS3 constitutes more than 95 percent of the computing power in the entire Folding@home network.

Interesting that the PS3 would be better at distributed computing than most PCs.

The Folding@home project can be accessed and activated in the PS3 menu by navigating to the link near the PlayStation Store. You must agree to allow your PS3 to be used to do the following:

By connecting to the folding@home network, your PS3 system will help support medical research designed to increase our understanding of serious diseases. This research may eventually lead to cures. Folding@home is supported by Standford University and volunteers who are making a contribution to society by donating computing power to this important project.

Our electricity bill at home is already higher than most our neighbors (according to the electric company) but I’m all for donating computing power to good causes and agreed to burn some more downtime power. The next step was downloading a 50MB file. While doing that, I perused the folding@home website that describes one of their project goals:

to simulate protein folding in order to understand how proteins fold so quickly and reliably, and to learn how to make synthetic polymers with these properties.

The loading is done, time to fire up this badboy (load screen at top of this post). There is a wind-like blowing sound that gets old fast so note to mute the volume. A picture of the earth slowly rotating shows lights where the distributed computers are currently working:

If this power consumption stuff keeps up we’re going to have to buy some solar panels.

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