PS3 Crowned King of Folding at Home

Perhaps there’s something in the claims for that new-fangled Cell chippery after all. According to some figures on the Stanford Folding@home pages, the Sony PS3 is making mincemeat of all the other types of “computer” involved in the project.

The page here shows 30,915 PS3 CPUs as responsible for 492 TFLOPS of processing. In comparison, some 162,197 Windows PCs manage some 154 TFLOPS of calculations.

the Inquirer - PS3 crowned king of folding at home

Just now, as approximately 30k PS3s were about to push Folding over a PFLOP (1000 TFLOPS), Folding staff at Stanford seem to have reestimated the PS3’s power of calculation to be about 50% less than previously thought. No matter. We’re not that far off from PFLOPing, according to the FAQ, if you all get off your asses and buy PS3s for Folding.

Here’s how: Basically, If we can get another 20k of the 2 million PS3’s out there now to start folding, the Stanford distributed computing project can still be the first to hit the Petaflop level. That’s more crunch than the fastest super computer we know of, the MDGRAPE-3 in Japan. For now, Folding is merely the most powerful distributed computing system in the world…never mind the only system capable of playing HD games and movies.

Gizmodo - PS3 Folding@Home TFLOP Rating Demoted by 50%, PFLOPS Still Possible