Posted By: motz
An interesting article has appeared on BBC News. Apparently, the PS3 is so powerful, it will be used for medical studies!
The spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) will be harnessed by scientists trying to understand the cause of diseases like Alzheimer's.
Sony has teamed up with US biologists who already run the distributed computing project, folding@home (FAH).
The project harnesses the capacity of thousands of PCs to examine how the shape of proteins, critical to most biological functions, affect disease.
FAH say a network of PS3's will allow performance similar to supercomputers.
With 10,000 machines joined together the researchers calculate they should be able to do a thousand trillion calculations per second.
If that was achieved it would be nearly four times as fast as the world's most powerful supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L System, capable of 280.6 trillion calculations per second.
The PS3 cell specs are as follows:
- 256 billion calculations per second
- 2.5MB of on-chip memory
- Able to shuttle data to and from off-chip memory at speeds up to 100 gigabytes per second,
- 234 million transistors
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