Nearly 60,000 PS3 owners sign up for Folding@Home; They join 2 million PC and Mac users; Will Rosetta@Home come to Xbox 360?
In one week time the PS3 has more than doubled the Folding@Home combined PC & Mac distributed computing capacity from 281 to 613 teraflops! That’s to say, before March 23 2007, there was no Folding@Home available for PS3. Now a week later nearly 60,000 (58,746 to be exact) PS3 owners have signed up for Folding@Home and 25,340 of them are actively running it at least every 2 days.
With PS3 system version 1.6 or later you can help create simulations to further study of protein folding and related diseases, including Alzheimer’s Disease, Huntington’s Disease, and certain forms of cancer. To sign up for Folding@Home, which runs while PS3 consoles are idle, you can select the Folding@Home icon in the Network column in the Xcross Media Bar (the PS3 menu).
To help, your PS3 downloads one so-called Work Unit, the time to complete simulating this Work Unit for the PS3 is short (8 hours), so the deadline time is also correspondingly short (2 days). This is necessary due to the fact that researching future Work Units depend on old ones and so Stanford University need to eventually give the work to someone else to get it completed.
How much does it cost you to help find a cure for cancer? You can find a full U.S. chart at IGN that was compiled to see how much it would cost you to run Folding@Home on a PlayStation 3 for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. On average that’ll cost only $12.23 a month.
Folding@Home isn’t the only distributed protein-folding program around, there’s also Rosetta@Home. Xbox 360 might also get a Folding@Home program of their own, because Xbox Live has been opened to developers via the XNA Game Developers Framework that allows them to develop programs on their own.
Back in October 2006 they were asked about Rosetta@Home on the project’s message board, head scientist and developer David Baker said that: “we have been discussing this idea with Microsoft quite a bit over the past several weeks; I will keep everybody posted.” No word on it since, but if it’s happening, it might take a while to develop.
If you don’t have a PS3 to run it and don’t want to wait for an Xbox 360 version of the service to help simulate the protein folding process, you can also download the Folding@Home software for your PC with Windows or Linux or your Mac. Nearly 2 million PC and Mac users already do it. 
ps2 was made before ps3
