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Mar 18, 2007

"In today's environment, hoarding knowledge ultimately erodes your power. If you know something very important, the way to get power is by actually sharing it." --Joseph Badaracco

PlayStation To Help Fight Disease

Thanks to a creative usage of cutting-edge technology, anyone with a broadband-connected Sony PlayStation 3 can soon enlist in the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's and a variety of cancers. By allowing users to download optional software designed to distribute computations across many idle gaming systems, Stanford University's Folding@home project harnesses the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly. With the help of a powerful chip that IBM is using in a supercomputer, the processing power of a PS3 equals to that of 20 to 30 typical home computers. So if just 10,000 people download the simulations and run them to completion, the project estimates it will double the computing help it already gets from personal computers around the globe.