Tuesday, September 19, 2006

PlayStation’s serious side

Kids aiming to persuade their parents to buy the PlayStation 3 have some new ammunition--<A HREF="http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/fun.games/09/18/playstation.folding/index.html">donating their PS3's down time to researchers</A> could help cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or mad cow disease. This November, Sony's PS3, with a price tag from $499 to $599, will challenge Microsoft's XBox 360 and Nintendo's Wii in a battle royale for holiday dollars. The PS3's chip is the same one IBM is using in a supercomputer it's building for the Department of Energy. Folding@home uses a network of about 200,000 personal computers to simulate how proteins assemble themselves. A network of PS3s would run even faster. To participate, users will just download a program into the PS3's hard drive. Then they just need to leave the machine on when they're not playing. The Folding@home team will divide their complex calculations into manageable chunks and then send it to the participating machines.

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