Sony PS3s will help Stanford fight diseases

Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles will soon have the ability to connect to Stanford University's Folding@home program, project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases. Folding@home uses a large computer network to perform simulations to study this complex process, but it takes too much time. By implementing a distributed computing network of PS3 systems with their powerful Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) CPUs in the research process scientists will able to perform simulations much faster.

With the latest system software update to be available in March PS3 owners will be able to join the program by clicking on the Folding@home icon in the XrossMediaBar's Network menu, or to set the application to start automatically whenever PS3 is idle.