Playstation 3 Distributed Computing

I've read a bit recently about the 'Folding@home' project — indeed I have the screensaver installed on my work machine — and I never thought that a gaming console would make such an impact in this area of research.

The global network of PS3 machines recently set the world record of 1 petaflop for the speed at which they calculated the solutions to one of the most difficult problems facing scientists today, that of protein folding.

Due to the immense complexity of the problem, huge amounts of computing power are needed and — rather than buy their own petaflop computer — the team at Stanford University decided to use the world's Internet-connected computers to help them achieve this computational milestone.

Ray Kurzweil estimated the computational capacity of the human brain at about 16 petaflops meaning that we are not that far away from at least real time simulation of a full human brain.

There is a problem with this comparison, though.

The Folding@home project is aimed at a very narrow area of expertise, that of simulating protein folding. Unlike a brain, a computer system — even a distributed computing system — will only ever be good for solving the problem it's been programmed to do. The human brain is capable of at least contemplating a huge number of different concepts so computing power alone seems to be in this case a false ideal.

Should we be looking at ways of changing the way these machines can talk to each other, as well as just how many are talking? A new, underlying and powerful means of allowing computers to connect and share chunks of memory, caclulations and even computational methods needs to be devised if we are ever to see machines move beyond the rigid, preprogrammed lumps that process our words and serve our web pages.

But, way to go Sony for at least opening these channels of communication in the first place.

You can download the Folding@home client for your machine (whatever it is) here.