Folding@home wins a Guinness World Record
The games might have been a little late to the party, but at least PlayStation 3 owners were using their consoles for something worthwhile. Guinness World Records have announced that Sony’s Folding@home program is the most powerful distributed computing network in the world.
In early September, PC and PS3 owners came through to produce over a petaflop of computing power. This was not good enough for PS3 owners who on September 23rd went on to produce a petaflop on their own.
Vijay Pande, associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead is overjoyed with the results:
“To have Folding@home recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful. Without them we would not be able to make the advancements we have made in our studies of several different diseases. But it is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3, it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds.”
Currently 670,000 individual users have registered with the Folding@home network, about 13% of PlayStation 3 owners if you assume each owner has one console. Sony has vowed to continue to support academia related distributed computing projects with the PlayStation 3.
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