Playstation 3 aids search for Alzheimer cure

The forthcoming Playstation 3 is to be recruited into a distributed-computing project seeking a cure for Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

The Folding@Home project by Stanford University in the US already has numerous other projects involving hundreds of thousands of PCs around the world, running computational simulations.

Volunteers agree to become part of the distributed computing network by running a small piece of software on their PC which uses some of the system’s spare resources to help the massive simulations run.

Folding@Home has now announced that a network of the forthcoming PS3 games consoles could allow it to achieve results only possible with supercomputers. Like the PC-based projects, the projects will use the spare computing power of the Cell processor and rely on gamers signing up.

The group is hoping to create a distributed network of PS3s to run bigger simulations about protein folding and related diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Huntington's and certain forms of cancer. Sony will be offering software that will let the PS3 hook up to the Folding@Home projects.

“With this new technology (as well as new advances with GPUs), we will likely be able to attain performance on the 100gigaflop scale per computer. With about 10,000 such machines, we would be able to achieve performance on the petaflop scale,” the group said in a statement.

With a network of just 10,000 PS3s, the researchers estimate that it could crunch a thousand trillion calculations per second. That would make it four times faster than the worlds fastest supercomputer, IBM BlueGene/L System.

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