Folding@home milestone reached @ Gaming Target

Written by Ashley Coomer on September 23, 2007

News: The PlayStation 3's Folding@home project has just reached its first milestone.

The Official PlayStation Blog has just announced the Folding@home project has reached its first milestone, a petaflop, which translates to one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).

The blog's poster and project manager Noam Rimon puts this into perspective by writing СIf you'd like to imagine this enormous computation capacity, think about calculating a tip on a restaurant bill, now do that for 75,000 different bills, now do that every second, and lastly, imagine everybody on the planet is doing those calculations at the same second - this is a petaflop calculation.'

How did this petaflop happen? According to the blog it's down to several factors Ц the increased participation from the Folding@home community (six months after the project launched, 600,000 PS3 users have registered) and version 1.2 of the project Ц which increased the accuracy of computations and allowed more power from each PS3 Ц which increased the overall number from 450 to 800 teraflops.

They're just numbers though right? Well no, actually. These numbers could have only been accomplished previously on a supercomputer which would have cost millions of dollars. This is quite an accomplishment for a video games console's feature, and Stanford University is saying the feature is helping to conduct research which would normally take at least another 10 years.

For more information about Folding@home and how you can help contribute to the research of serious diseases, please visit the Stanford University Folding@home website.