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NewsvineLooking for an excuse to tell your parents before you buy that new PlayStation 3 (PS3)?
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Tell them you’re helping medical research. You won’t be lying.
In fact, PS3 consoles contribute tremendously to Stanford’s Folding@Home protein folding research. The video game systems perform over 75 percent of the program’s work, even though they comprise only 16 percent of the total machines working on the project.
When proteins in the body prepare to execute a task, they go through a process known as protein folding, according to Folding@Home head Vijay Pande, a professor of structural biology and chemistry. When proteins do not fold properly, scientists believe, illnesses such as Huntington’s Disease and cystic fibrosis can occur.
The Folding@Home project uses the concept of distributed computing to parcel out lots of work to many individuals across the world via the Internet. At first, this included only personal computers, but in 2006 the project started utilizing PS3s, which can be connected to do calculations for the research. The results were staggering.
According to the group’s Web site, trajectories that used to take years to plot now take just a few weeks or months.
“The primary advantage of the PlayStation 3 is pure speed,” Pande said, adding that the gaming machine is capable of calculations up to 20 times faster than the earlier methods.
The modeling and calculations involved in understanding protein folding require an extraordinary amount of computer processing power — millions of operations per second. With even industry standard supercomputing resources, this could mean years’ worth of number-crunching: Pande’s group’s first simulation, on Alzheimer’s disease, ran nonstop for nearly two years straight.
That’s where the PS3’s powerful processor comes in. With this huge gain in power from the video game system has come a great leap in research progress. Last week, the project reached the peraflop mark; a flop is a floating point operation per second, and one peraflop equals 10^15 operations per second.
Pande compared that number to the number of people in the world as a point of reference.
“If you gave everyone on the planet a calculator and they hit the keys in one second, that would be one-sixth the power of a PlayStation 3,” Pande explained. “And that’s just one PlayStation3. We have 30 to 40 thousand active.”
The research data collected from the Folding@Home project has led to articles in a number of prestigious scientific publications, including a 2007 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Now all you need to do is to buy some games.