Last month Stanford University invited owners of Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game console to join the Folding@Home project, which uses distributed-computing technology to simulate the complicated process of protein folding.
Sony officials are already hailing the PlayStation project as a success. About 250,000 PlayStation users now run Folding@Home when they’re not playing games, and that influx of new participants has more than doubled the endeavor’s overall processing power, according to PC Advisor.
If Folding@Home continues to hum along on PlayStations, it’s a safe bet that more distributed-computing projects will start appealing to video-game players. —Brock Read
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