Folding@home Details
PS3 to diseases: Screw you.
showUSloc=(checkLocale('uk')||checkLocale('au'));document.writeln(showUSloc ? 'US, ' : '');US, March 15, 2007 - Hey, Alzheimer's, the gamers are coming for you.
Officals from Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and StanfordUniversity's Folding@home program met on the college campus andannounced that the long-hyped PS3 program that will crunch data ondisease is set to go live at the end of the month.
"It's really a perfect fit for us because it lets us apply ourtechnological advancement to something that is so good and soimportant," said Richard Marks, senior researcher with Sony ComputerEntertainment America. "One of the main reasons we're here today isjust kind of a call to action to PlayStation 3 owners."
Curing diseases is as simple as a single button press.
Alzheimer's,cancer, Parkinson's and cystic fibrosis all involve proteins beingfolded wrong in some way or another. It's a complicated process thatscientists are trying to understand in hopes of creating cures andpreventative measures for these ailments.
"We want to understand what is going on at a microscopic scale," saidVijay Pande, associate professor of Chemistry at Stanford and theFolding@home project lead.
The problem is, creating simulations that mimic microscopic, misfoldingproteins takes a while. A long while. Folding@home started "distributedcomputing," a program that sent packets of data to participatingcomputers for computation, in October 2000, and it took two years tocalculate the initial Alzheimer's information, Pande said.
Enter the PS3.
Using its Cell Broadband Engine, Sony's pride and joy can run thesesimulations roughly 20 to 30 times faster than the standard PC. If thetwo million PS3 units in homes across the globe jump on theFolding@home train, researchers hope to accomplish what once took themyears in a matter of months.
"That's a huge amount of computation power overall," Marks said.
Packaged with a system update expected to go live at the end of March,Folding@home will pop up on the XrossMediaBar and feature two ways forgamers to get their cure on - PS3 owners can either click on theFolding@home icon to enter the program or set the application up to runautomatically anytime the PS3 enters idle mode from the XMB screen.
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Whatever way you choose, the protein data is downloaded from Stanford, crunched on your unit and uploaded back to Stanford.
If you choose to click the icon yourself, you'll be treated with amodel of a protein fold. The motley image of rods connected to red,blue and yellow balls vibrates and bounces in the center of the screenwhile the computer manipulates the data. If a quick image of the modelgrabs your attention, you can pause the image and rotate it while theactual processing continues on.
Although you probably won't spend hours staring at your flat-screenwhile Folding@home goes to work - even though you can change the HDvisualization and zoom in and out - there are some nifty features thenumber cruncher comes equipped with. A user can personalize theirmachine's name, keep track of the number of protein folds the systemhas completed work on, check how far along the current fold is, see thelatest project news and view a live map to see how many other PS3s areworking on complex protein problems.
The PS3 puts the Cell to medical use.
Of course, it wouldn't be a video game without competition.
Users can create and join teams to track the total numbers of projectscompleted and see how they're fairing against users across the world.To create a team, users choose the option from the Folding@home screenand are redirected to the Stanford homepage through the PS3 Webbrowser. Once created, give your team number to friends and they joinin a similar program-to-browser move. A list of teams will be availableon the Stanford Web site, but there is no way to keep riff-raffresearchers from joining your team.
"There's a lot here for users to do if they choose, but as I mentionedbefore, all they have to do is click on it and it's helping," Markssaid.
The voluntary program is free but needs to run on its own - i.e. no background experiments.
"I think that we'll probably never do" downloads "while you're playinga game," Marks said. "When we're running this, we want all outcomputation involved with this."
Is it handsome in here, or is it just me?