Stanford has set a new world record for video game console use — but not in the way you’d expect.

Thanks to Sony’s Playstation 3 (PS3), the University’s Folding@

Home project has officially garnered the world’s most powerful distributed computing system, according to Guinness.

Folding@Home works to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of protein folding using the rapid processing power of the PS3, along with personal computers. According to the project’s head, Structural Biology and Chemistry Prof. Vijay Pande, the PS3 in particular has made calculations 20 times faster than previous methods.

With registration open since 2006, more than 600,000 PS3’s worldwide have joined in the pursuit of science, amassing more than a petraflop — over 1,000 trillion floating point operations per second — just last month.

The previous computing champion, Berkeley’s SETI@Home project (Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), topped out at 265 teraflops — or 265 trillion floating point operations per second.

Leave it to Stanford-affiliated gamers to beat Cal and produce valuable research at the same time.