by Playfuls Staff |
24th March 2007
The worldwide launch of PlayStation 3 dramatically increased the processing power for the Folding@home program, the combined force of Cell CPUs simply dwarfing any other participating systems.[more]
Sony, you have my admiration for this one: it appears that the Folding@home project from Stanford University got an enormous boost after the worldwide launch of the PlayStation 3. Despite early reports that the PAL debut of the consoles was market by sluggish sales and lack of enthusiasm, it seems those who already own one are willing to share its processing capabilities for the benefit of human kind.
The Folding@home program was made available for PS3s through a software update released two days ago, in anticipation of the console’s debut in PAL areas. The real-time statistics displayed on Stanford’s site at the moment when I’m writing this article are definitely a big, big plus for the Japanese electronics giant and for its fans too: the combined power of the 24,021 PS3s which are currently crunching numbers is simply dwarfing the other platforms involved, mainly Windows, Linux and Macs. The active PS3s are contributing 589 Tera (trillion) FLoating point Operations Per Second (TFLOPS) to the FAH program, more than double the combined power of all other systems involved (the Windows/Linux PCs, the Macs and the GPUs “barely” reach 144 TFLOPS together). Both Stanford and Sony are expecting the PS3 to push the project into the PFLOPS scale, with one PFLOPS equaling that of 1000 TFLOPS, or 1 quadrillion FLOPS.
In computing, FLOPS (or flops) is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. This is used as a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations; similar to instructions per second. As of 2006 the fastest supercomputer's performance tops out at one petaflops.
Folding@home program is a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases.
Currently, the project harnesses the capacity of thousands of PCs to examine how the shape of proteins, critical to most biological functions, affects diseases.
FAH founders estimated that a network of PS3's will allow performance similar to supercomputers. Since the aforementioned simulations can take up to 30 years for a single computer to complete, Folding@home enables this task to be shared among thousands of computers connected via the network, utilizing distributed computing technology. Once the data is processed, the information is sent back via the Internet to the central computer. The Cell/B.E. processor inside each PS3 is roughly 10 times faster than a standard mainstream chip inside a personal computer (PC), so researchers are able to perform the simulations much faster, speeding up the research process.
A standard PC working alone would take a day to simulate 1 billionth of a second of protein folding. But scientists believe that 10,000 idle PS3s can be four times faster than IBM's BlueGene/L System, which cranks out 280.6 trillion calculations per second. And if Sony could actually sell the PS3 with as much success as the PS2, imagine what 100 million units could do.
According to a Stanford University statement, the PS3 client also supports some advanced visualization features. While the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PlayStation 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering. It is possible to navigate the 3D space of the molecule using the interactive controller of the PS3, allowing us to look at the protein from different angles in real-time.
Thanks to new computational methods that are able to use streaming processors like the PS3's Cell, and before long, ATI graphics cards, Folding@home believes it will be able to take its research to a higher order of magnitude. The Cell Processor is expected to perform calculations for Folding@home on the scale of 100 gigaflops. With 10,000 PS3s churning away, Folding@home expects Petaflop performance (that's a Quadrillion--1,000,000,000,000,000—floating point operations a second). There are currently only 200,000 actively processing Folding@home computers today, which means an influx of millions of PS3s capable of joining the project could massively expand the capabilities of the Folding@home, enough so that project leaders are now considering expanding their simulations to study Alzheimer's and Huntington's Diseases and other forms of cancer.
Stanford University is now leveraging PS3’s powerful Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) to help study the causes of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and many cancers.
To run the application automatically in idle state, PS3 must be connected to the network with both main power switch and power button turned on. Option setting must also be changed as this automatic feature is off at default.
What can I say more than congratulations Sony…
