PlayStation 3 tackles world ills

"should be able to do a thousand trillion calculations per second"

[Birdman]

Very cool stuff! I guess this justifies the $600 spend now ;)

The spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) will be harnessed by scientists trying to understand the cause of diseases like Alzheimer's.

With 10,000 machines joined together the researchers calculate they should be able to do a thousand trillion calculations per second.

If that was achieved it would be nearly four times as fast as the world's most powerful supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L System, capable of 280.6 trillion calculations per second.

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

[greenleaves]

It's great as long as it is a program that is voluntarily downloaded, and not something that comes standard.

I can imagine many upset customers wondering why their internet conection is so slow when they have their PS3 on.

[eelixduppy]

Volunteers download a piece of software that uses their PC or PS3's processing power when it is idle.

Guess that answers that ;)

It's a very interesting idea. I hope it works!

[JudgeJeffries]

Been done before with PC's hasnt it?

[Birdman]

The project will be a mix of pcs and ps3s. I imagine more pcs than ps3s, every bit will help, especially when you look at the specs of the "cell" in the ps3:

The PS3 has a powerful processor known as a "cell", which will run up to 10 times faster than current PC chips.

CELL SPECS

• 256 billion calculations per second
  
• 2.5MB of on-chip memory
  
• Able to shuttle data to and from off-chip memory at speeds up to
• 100 gigabytes per second,
  
• 234 million transistors