Sony demoed their Folding@Home client for the PS3 yesterday at the Leipzig Games Conference. Stanford’s Folding@Home project now has a Sony PS3 client with the Graphical User Interface (GUI) shown in the real-time video below.
When you’re not using your PlayStation 3 and you can take it online to pick up new research data, then the PS3 can help find a cure for cancer for the Cure@PS3 project, by using its new Cell processor to unfold the complex shape of this (proteins) data. The graphic chip in the PS3 displays this process, and you navigate the 3D space of the molecule with the PS3 controller, like this:
What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project — people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. With about 10,000 PS3’s, researchers would be able to achieve performance on the petaflop scale.
Via Engadget