The ultimate video game advertising gimmick: Buy our system, help cure cancer.
Offline Normally I'd have posted this quite awhile ago, but this isn't exactly a gamer forum. However, I find it ties into medical technology far too much to leave it alone. And the possibilities are rather astronomical.
Long story short, Sony has teamed up with Stanford University to run Stanford's Folding@home program on the PS3. For those who don't know about the project or the PS3's update allowing it to run; Folding@home is a program using a network of computers to try and decode protein folding and misfolding, which can be responsible for diseases ranging from Cancers to Alzheimers and more. Previously the program was running on about 200,000 PC's. The suggestion is that if even 10,000 PS3's are added to the network, the processing power will double. This is not an attempt by me to get you to go out and buy a PS3, this is Sony's attempt. 
It does not impact gaming at all. The system only runs the program when the PS3 is left on and connected to the net. I will have to suspect that even now there are a couple of huge supporters who already have four or five PS3's plugged in and doing nothing but running the program.
Now I'm not personally recommending you go out and buy a PS3. In fact, as a hardcore gamer I recommend against it. Wait about a year and not only will the price drop, but the available library of games will be more than tripled. There will also be a great number of software updates and probably even a couple of hardware updates made in that time period.
But if Sony can make the PS3 succeed with even half of the PS2's success, then there is the potential for more than 500,000 PS3's running this program or another with similar potential within a 6 year period. When considering the processing power of the console on it's own, imagining 500,000 of them working in tandem alongside hundreds of thousands of PC's....you've got the most powerful supercomputer ever imagined, let alone designed. This could be one of the next revolutions in gaming. I suspect Microsoft will follow Sony's lead. Nintendo is a bit less likely, but still possible.
If you want to read about the program side of the project(and it's successes), then click here:
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
- Login to post comments
Bump for the weekend.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
That's interesting.
I've heard of "folding" before, but have never lent my computer. My gaming group supports SETI (wasn't interested). My political board was lending computing support to the site, which is heavily trafficked...whew! I don't post there much anymore because it got too big and too rude, but hey.
I don't have a PS3, but I'd be more likely to lend my computer to a cause like curing cancer.
Books on atheism, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server.
Actually, Folding is only one of many projects you can participate. The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open software for volunteer comuping and desktop grid computing.
In other words, it uses your idle CPU time to run calculations. These calculations would be too massive even for a supercomputer, so the scientists divide it into Work Units (WUs) and distribute them to the BOINC clients (idle PCs, grids and computing farms). This way, each client does a little piece of work which when put together becomes a result and eventually is used on reasearch
There are lots of different projects that use the BOINC interface such as Einstein@Home, that searches for gravitons and other predicted elements of Einstein's General Relativity theory; LHC@Home, which helps build and later calibrate the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN; NanoHive@Home: test structure's stability on nano-scale to help design nano-factories and so on; Spinhenge@Home, project that looks into the magnetic properties of atoms (spin); and World Community Grid, a grid that contains 5 different projects you can choose from: Genome Comparison, FightAids@Home, Help Defeat Cancer, Human Proteome Folding and Help Cure Muscular Distrophy.
Those are the projects I'm envolved with, but there are many others and, of course, there is a list, here.
I hope I just encouraged someone to join! =D Please bump from time to time, this is an important matter!
'Later!
http://youtube.com/phillipetrindade - Reasonable dialogue about atheism. Please visit, rate it and comment. Thanks!
Bump. I should mention that the PS3 only does the folding@home, not any of the other projects. Perhaps future software updates will allow for other projects.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
We use a program like this (World Community Grid, specifically) on our computers at work. Thus, when I'm posting on here during work, I'm not allowing my computer to help science.
Shaun
I'll fight for a person's right to speak so long as that person will, in return, fight to allow me to challenge their opinions and ridicule them as the content of their ideas merit.