PlayStation 3 tackles world ills

An interesting article has appeared on BBC News. Apparently, the PS3 is so powerful, it will be used for medical studies!

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.

Sony has teamed up with US biologists who already run the distributed computing project, folding@home (FAH).
The project harnesses the capacity of thousands of PCs to examine how the shape of proteins, critical to most biological functions, affect disease.
FAH say a network of PS3's will allow performance similar to supercomputers.
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.

The PS3 cell specs are as follows:

• 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

More via BBC

remindes me of other clustering projects involving xbox's and also ps2'2.There are also several cluster projects on college campuses,one I believe used i-books.

Hopefully the first protein they study is the one that causes madcow disease or CJD in humans.

im guessing they want to use the cell processor rather than 10000 PS3s

They said something like this about the PS2 and look how that turned out.

I don't think the results of those other cluster projects are too publicized,I guess you just gotta know where to look.
How did that ps2 cluster project turn out $n!per?
This brings to mind 4 possibilities for the ps3
1. the ps3 includes cluster software on it's linux system(not likely)
2.they plan on modding them to cluster(also not very likely)
3.you can actually install software to the ps3 such as the software needed for clustering!Which would mean we have more control over our system.
4.sony releases propietary software to do this(just like the RTE for ps2):(

only thing is if sony releases proprietary software to do this,which in my opinion would be very uncool and contrary to the concept of using linux on their box.

after all sony did say it was a computer,we should be able to configure our computers to behave the way we want!!!

If it's got linux on it they have to release the source for ps3 linux right?
At least for the modified kernel it'll be using,which opens the door for homebrew and open source apps on the ps3.

Wait, wait.. so you're telling me that the reason why there's going to be a shortage of PS3s, and the reason why I'm going to have to fight hobos in the bitter cold to get one instead of being able to reserve it is because they're using 10,000 for this?! O_O

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!!

Yeah,sounds like a potential market controlled shortage huh?
Maybe not though if it's only 10,000.

simple ad, nothing more

yes it is possible scientists will use the Cell processors in there work, but we will never see 10,000 PS3s locked up in a research center

There are clusters close to or of that size already in existence

but not of consoles, and definately not using consoles for uses such as this