I recently purchased a PlayStation 3. I made the purchase right after the release of the 1.9 Firmware. After updating to the latest version of the firmware, I was surprised and happy to discover that Sony had added a Folding@home client for the PS3.
This is a wonderful idea especially given the processing power of the PS3. I pulled this information from wikipedia
“The PS3 uses the Cell microprocessor, which is made up of a PowerPC-based “Power Processing Element” (PPE) and six accessible 3.2 GHz Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). A seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to aspects of the OS and security, and an eighth is disabled to improve production yields. The floating point performance of the whole system (CPU + GPU) is reported to be 2 TFLOPS. PlayStation 3’s Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float and 15 GFLOPS double precision. The PS3 has 256 MB of Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed.”
I decided to download the Folding@home client on my Desktop and Server to assist in this project. My PlayStation, when not in use is usually processing for Folding@home.
I started a team so that I can track all my systems independently of each other. If you would like to join my team feel free. My team number is 81229. I currently run the client on my Linux based desktop and my Windows Server 2003 based server. Becuase I have also discovered running the Linux client does not require root privileges, I run it at work in the background while I’m there.
I strongly suggest everyone download this client. I think its a wonderful thing to be assisting. Additional information can be found at the following links.
- Project Homepage – http://folding.stanford.edu/
- Download- http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html
- Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
