PS3 cures the ill (not a joke)

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-08-26 02:18pm

The spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) will be harnessed by scientists trying to understand the cause of diseases like Alzheimer's.

Sony has teamed up with US biologists who already run the distributed computing project, folding@home (FAH).

The project harnesses the capacity of thousands of PCs to examine how the shape of proteins, critical to most biological functions, affect disease.

FAH say a network of PS3's will allow performance similar to supercomputers.

With 10,000 machines joined together the researchers calculate they should be able to do a thousand trillion calculations per second.

If that was achieved it would be nearly four times as fast as the world's most powerful supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L System, capable of 280.6 trillion calculations per second.

Complex problems

Distributed computing is a way of solving large complex problems by dividing them between many computers.

Volunteers download a piece of software that uses their PC or PS3's processing power when it is idle.

In this way small packets of data can be crunched by individual machines, before being automatically fed back over the internet to a central computer where all of the results can be viewed together.

The method is already used by scientists examining millions of simulations of how malaria spreads to look for ways to control the disease.

Other groups are searching through thousands of hours of radio telescope signals for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Biological processes

The FAH uses distributed computing to examine protein folding and how it maybe linked to diseases. The way in which proteins contort underpins almost every biological process.

When they do not fold correctly they can cause diseases such as Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers.

Scientists still do not entirely understand how or why this process occurs.

To try to gain a better understanding, scientists need to simulate the complex folding process.

However, although a fold may take just ten millionths of a second (10 microseconds) in the body, it takes far longer to simulate on a computer.

An average PC would take all day just to simulate just one billionth of a second (one nanosecond) of protein folding, and 10,000 days to simulate a complete fold.

Dividing the problem up allows the researchers to speed through many more simulations.

Advanced gaming

The scientists hope the arrival of the PS3 will take this research up another level.

Sony has demonstrated a piece of protein-folding software that will run on its PS3 when it is launched in November.

The PS3 has a powerful processor known as a "cell", which will run up to 10 times faster than current PC chips.

A graphical interface, also being developed between Sony and FAH, will eventually allow users and the scientists to look at the protein from different angles as it folds in real-time.

The new interface takes advantage of the PS3's graphics chip, designed for advanced gaming.

The graphics application is currently undergoing tests and is expected to be finished by September.

When the program is released to PS3 owners, the scientists say they will be able to "address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally".

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-08-26 02:19pm

It only gets better as another version will be released that can use ATIs X1xxx card series.

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2006-08-26 02:24pm

Someone did a similar trick with PS2s.

Given the floating point power and versatility of the chips in home consoles and graphics cards it actually makes more sense than doing the same operation in idle CPU time on a standard desktop.

Especially with the newer graphics architectures, which are designed to run distributed processing in SLI modes.

LongVin · Post by **LongVin** » 2006-08-26 03:12pm

So when will the PS3 be able to do my taxes while also ordering me a pizza, get the pizza when it arrives pay and tip the deliveryboy and then feed me the pizza?

Dooey Jo · Post by **Dooey Jo** » 2006-08-26 04:01pm

Excellent. Perhaps in the future, we will have reports of people being magically healed while playing video games. God works through the machine, so to speak

Or not, but it'd be funny to see the reactions of a certain group...

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-08-27 11:55am

It does make some small amount of sense, as Cell is much more suited for a task like Folding than just about anything else (why they put it in a game console is a mystery to me), but from what I understand, as soon as GPU folding comes online, it will be even faster.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-08-27 02:23pm

Well, when a lot of supercomputers are really just desktop systems running in parallel, it makes sense to get something dedicated to these operations running a similar array. When it comes to protein folding, you need all the raw Hz you can get and then some.