All the way back in August of last year, Stanford University announced that
it had partnered up with Sony to port its Folding@Home
distributed computing software to the PlayStation 3 console.
Joystiq now reports that a
Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 will finally come out next week,
on March 23.
According to details from
the
Folding@home web site, PS3 is able "to achieve performance previously only
possible on supercomputers," with each computer likely "able to attain
performance on the 100 gigaflop scale." With about 10,000 such machines, or
about 1 percent of all PlayStation 3 consoles in the U.S., performance on the
petaflop scale would be added to
Folding@home.
The PS3 version of the Folding@home software will also feature an upgraded,
flashier interface. The Cell processor will be consumed with simulations, but
the NVIDIA RSX GPU will be free to provide a visual representation of the actual
folding process in real-time with graphical effects such as HDR and ISO surface
rendering. Users will also be granted a small bit of interactivity by using the
SIXAXIS controller to navigate the 3D space of the molecule to look at the
protein from different angles in real-time. For a video of a prototype of the
GUI for the PS3 client, check out
Folding@home's PS3 FAQ.
So what's the point of folding on a console? Well,
an
article by the San Jose Mercury News states that if 10,000 PS3 user-just 1%
of those who own the console in North America-run the software, it will double
the amount of computing power the project currently receives worldwide.Of
course, PS3 owners won't be able to play games at the same time they run the
folding simulations. They'll have to stop the simulation when they want to
switch to a game or other PS3 activity, such as using the machine's broadband
network to download a movie trailer from the PlayStation store. But they will be
able to set their machines to automatically resume the simulations if the PS3 is
turned on and not being used for anything else.