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#1 2006-09-18 7:42 pm
- Nefarious
- Tuning Fork
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Folding on Playstations
Who knew ?
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/fun.ga … n.folding/
Kids aiming to persuade their parents to buy the PlayStation 3 have some new ammunition -- donating their PS3's down time to researchers could help cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or mad cow disease.
This November, Sony's PS3, with a price tag from $499 to $599, will challenge Microsoft's XBox 360 and Nintendo's Wii in a battle royale for holiday dollars when it hits stores in the United States and Japan.
The PS3 uses a powerful new processor called the Cell Broadband Engine to run highly realistic games like "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07," "Metal Gear Solid 4" and "Full Auto 2." It also has a 20GB or 60GB hard drive (depending on the model) and can connect to the Internet either wirelessly, or with an Ethernet hookup so gamers can download new programs and take each other on.
The PS3's chip is the same one IBM is using in a supercomputer it's building for the Department of Energy. That computer is expected to reach speeds of one petaflop, or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. (Full story)
"It has so much horsepower and, of course, when you're playing a game all that horsepower will be used for the game. But there are a lot of times during the day when somebody's not playing the game," said Sony's Richard Marks. "It seemed like a good idea to be able to use that horsepower for something else that is, in this case, good for mankind."
Sony worked with Stanford University's Folding@home project to harness the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly.
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#3 2006-09-19 3:52 am
- kamizuno
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- From: Smileytown
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Re: Folding on Playstations
1 Petaflop 
<me passes out>
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#4 2006-09-19 3:56 pm
- g3 for me
- But we haven't had food for a one month.
- From: New York City
- Registered: 2004-03-20
- Posts: 1047
Re: Folding on Playstations
Wow! I wanted one of these as it was, but this just makes it sweeter.
I just don't know how the hell I'm going to be able to buy a new Mac and then one of these babies in the same year.
Oh boy, here comes the obsession.
Donate your spare CPU cycles to Folding@Home. You never know when you'll be in need.
Remember, the last time I wrote anything on this was Sept. 15th 2006
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#5 2007-08-27 10:34 pm
- Nefarious
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Re: Folding on Playstations
New Folding released for Playstations !
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/21971 … lding-home
The v1.2 application update also provides PS3 users with added functionalities and features, including support for Remote Play for the PlayStation Portable and added protein simulations and visuals.
It also offers a screensaver mode which enables the PS3 to consume slightly less power, and increases the performance of protein-folding simulations.
More than 536,000 PS3 users worldwide have downloaded the Folding@home application and have delivered up to 600 teraflops of data.
"We take a lot of pride in the fact that more than half a million PS3 users worldwide have dedicated a portion of their machine's capabilities towards helping Stanford University and their Folding@home team research many of the diseases that inflict our society today," said Jack Tretton, president and chief executive at Sony Computer Entertainment America.
"It is one thing for us to provide the technology to make this possible; it is quite another to have gamers from all over the world proactively sign up for this program to make a difference in our global community.
"We could not be more pleased with the results we have seen to date in this collaborative effort."
Fold on !
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#6 2007-12-06 2:23 pm
- Nefarious
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Re: Folding on Playstations
Technical Support for Playstation Folding@Home http://foldingforum.org/viewforum.php?f=3
Here's a thread I started : http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?t=170
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#7 2007-12-20 2:51 am
- Bat
- Flawless Cowboy
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Re: Folding on Playstations
New PS3 Folding@Home Features Released
PS3 owners who participate in the Folding@Home distributed computer program have a couple of new features . As describe on the official Playstation blog site the new features will allow users to set a specific time to shut down their PS3 so they might go to sleep while the program is running. The other new feature adds being able to play music tracks on the PS3's hard drive while the Folding@Home program is running.
http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsart … chid=18844
Last edited by Nefarious (2007-12-24 7:23 pm)
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion - George Bernard Shaw
"Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air."
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#8 2008-03-18 1:00 am
Re: Folding on Playstations
what team number do I enter to contribute the PS3 folding to the macaddcit team?
MacBook Pro 17|2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo|4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3|320 HD @ 7200 RPM|NVIDIA GeForce 9600 M GT 512 MB
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#9 2008-03-18 6:27 am
Re: Folding on Playstations
Aaron_R wrote:
what team number do I enter to contribute the PS3 folding to the macaddcit team?
We are team 18.
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#10 2008-09-18 3:54 pm
Re: Folding on Playstations
Downloading the latest version of folding@home for PS3 will also get you Life with playstation which is essentially Sony's take on Wii News.
Thanks for the heads up. Nef.
Last edited by Nefarious (2008-09-18 4:40 pm)
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