“If 1,000 people join in this cooperative effort, we will be able to compute the equivalent of 16,000 single-core computers,” says researcher Gianni de Fabritis, member of the Research Unit in Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) and head of the project. In fact, according to Fabritis, the softwareCell MD molecular dynamics, created for simulation, runs 20 times faster on the PS3 than on a personal computer. Thiscomputing poweris essential to know the behavior of biomolecules such asGramicidina A, a protein that is used as an antibiotic and which is now being studied by PS3GRID.
But this is not the first scientific project determined to use the enormous potential of the Play Station 3. Stanford University recently launchedfolding@home(FAH), which already has a network of almost 700,000 game consoles to investigate the formation of proteins, prions (implicated, among other things, in “mad cow” disease) and diseases caused by abnormal folding of proteins. In fact, folding @ home has just become part of theGuiness Book of Recordslike the networkmost powerful distributed computing system in the world.
