So since there are no games for PS3, I decided to put it to good use with the folding@home client Anyway, I figured with all of our members, we should be able to make a pretty good contribution to the folding@home project between all of the idle computers, servers, and PS3s that members have.
For those unfamiliar with the project...
By using your idle computers, you can install a screensaver that will perform calculations for the Stanford University protein folding simulation project. This information is used to better understand how proteins assemble themselves and to research diseases such as cancer, Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, osteogenesis imperfecta, alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, sickle-cell disease (drepanocytosis), Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, BSE (mad cow disease).
Even though though it takes the human body as little as a millionth of a second to assemble a protein, it still takes a modern computer about 30 years to accomplish the same thing. This project combines the computing power of all the participating computers and playstations around the world to make a massive distributed supercomputer, which is now able to accomplish this in less than a microsecond.
Since everyone tends to leave their computers running 24/7, you can set it to participate in the project when you aren't using it. There are clients for every major operating system, and the PS3 ships with one by default. The PS3 contributions are extremely powerful, so those help a lot.
Protein research is is particularly important because most diseases are manifested at the level of protein activity. It's also one of the most challenging computational problems of our era (in terms of raw power).
Download the screensaver/client here: http://folding.stanford.edu/Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases, including sickle-cell disease (drepanocytosis), Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, BSE (mad cow disease), cancer, Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, osteogenesis imperfecta, alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, and other aggregation-related diseases. More fundamentally, understanding the process of protein folding — how biological molecules assemble themselves into a functional state — is one of the outstanding problems of molecular biology. So far, the Folding@Home project has successfully simulated folding in the 5-10 microsecond range — a time scale thousands of times longer than it was previously thought possible to model. The Pande Group goal is to refine and improve the MD and Folding@Home DC methods to the level where it will become an essential tool for the MD research. For that goal they collaborate with various scientific institutions. As of December 13, 2007, fifty-four scientific research papers have been published using the project's work. A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report dated October 22, 2002 states that Folding@Home distributed simulations of protein folding are demonstrably accurate.
Beyond.ca Folding@Home Team Number is: 120501 - Anyone that runs a client, put this number in your folding client where it asks for the Team ID, and your stats will be counted as part of the team.
Beyond.ca folding team statistics:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...teamnum=120501
Team rankings:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...type=teamstats
hell, if rage2 contributes all the PS3s in his house, we will probably cure cancer by next week We should at least be able to beat mustangworld...and they're in the top 100!