PS3 users try to cure Alzheimer's Disease

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 25th April 2007

As over 250,000 PS3 users band together in Folding@Home, it seems the PS3 may yet have a redeeming feature to show.

Gamers worldwide may be angry with the PlayStation 3 for all number of reasons thanks to their marketing strategies, but one thing nobody can be mad about is the way the PS3 fanboys have embraced the Folding@Home project.

Folding@Home is a project begun at Stanford University that aims to use distributed computing to carry out studies in protein folding, a process that aims to provide cures in Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease and some cancers, among others.

The PS3 community has now joined together in this project and, thanks to over 250,000 new contributors, has doubled the total processing power available to the project. The total amount of computing power used in the folding project now stands at just over 700 teraFLOPs a second, over half of which stems from PS3 users.

Still, PS3 owners aren't the only people who can contribute and bit-tech runs its own team of protein folders, also known as team 33346.

PS3 owners who haven't yet joined can do so by clicking the Folding@Home icon on the CrossMediaBar.

If you're planning on joining team bit-tech.net, or if there's anything we can do to persuade you over to our team, then let us know in the forums.