PlayStation 3 Hits New Folding Landmark
By Chris on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 11:03 AM PST In Sony
A week ago, the Folding@home project hit a milestone when it crossed the petaflop mark. That was a truly impressive accomplishment in its own right, and is certainly one people can be happy about thanks to the fact this is obviously for a good cause. While it’s simply a landmark in terms of how much data has been processed, it’s only a good sign for potential future research.
Now, the PlayStation 3 on its own has hit the same landmark – one Petaflop – which is mind blowing considering the amount was once thought to be accomplishable only by a supercomputer. The 41, 145 PlayStations 3 owners who have contributed to the Folding project have something to be proud of. Any of you PS3 owners out there that don’t think running Folding@home will make a difference, think again.
“one Petaflop – which is mind blowing considering the amount was once thought to be accomplishable only by a supercomputer.”
Isn’t this still the case? I mean if it took 41K PS3s to do a petaflop, I would say that would make one helluva supercomputer if a machine could do that on its own. Is there even a supercomputer out there with this kind of throughput potential?
True. When they are all linked together they are effectively a supercomputer. IBMs new Supercomputer called Roadrunner uses 16,000 AMD Opteron CPU and 16,000 Cell processors the same as the ones in the PS3.
Wow, thats one mean setup. I bet you could almost play Crysis with everything turned up to full!
Thats great for science. Its good to see the PS3 put to use. I prefer to play games, mabe the PS3 will be used for its true purpose when it gets some good games.