We caught a
sneak peak of this last year, but Sony and Stanford have officially announced their
Folding@Home client for the PS3. (As you may or may not know, Folding@Home is a distributed computing project run by Stanford, which uses spare computer cycles in a massively parallelized computing environment to help find cures for diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and the like.
Engadget has a Folding@Home team, currently ranked at 32 worldwide.) While Sony's claims that a PS3 can complete work units 10 - 30 times faster than a desktop PC may be fairly dubious, we're more than happy to have y'all put it to the test with Team Engadget. The free F@H update should be available by the end of this month, and can be set to run while your PS3 is idle -- even provide a little eye candy as it crunches the numbers that could save lives.
Join Team Engadget here
posted Mar 15th 2007 1:24PM
I plan on doing this. It would be really great if it actually led to a breakthrough.The world needs one.
You don't need to "plan on doing this" (or even own a PS3) to help out Pande and Stanford in their protein folding research. F@H clients are already available for download on the Mac, Windows, and Linux. Even on more obscure OSes (Solaris :P), I have F@H crunching during downtime.
It's a great cause... and while I eagerly await running F@H on my PS3, I don't need to wait until late March to contribute to Team 53472 (Sony Gamer Advisory Panel)
there are no games for the ps3 so they resort to this crap. folding at home is already out...it's for the PC. People who have ps3's also have a PC and if they don't have a PC they don't have internet which means they could already do it if they wanted. So this does nothing except justify people's purchases of a crappy product.
Morder, i agree but most use their computer for lots of things, gamming, working, surfing, etc. but consoles have much more idle time them computers. so i guess if i had a pc i would uninstall the pc client and install the ps3 one.
and i guess you're wrong regarding internet access, i see this ps3 client as a huge vector to grow this fantastic project.
sorry about the english. cheers
Morder,
How did you take a post about PS3 helping to find a cure for cancer, and turn it into a "I hate Sony, PS3 is teh suck!!1" flame war? I think this is great, regardless of your feelings towards the PS3.
"if they don't have a PC they don't have internet "
Wait, are you telling me that without a computer, I don't have access to the internet? You do know that you're commenting on a tech blog, right? Maybe you're better suited for commenting on Horse & Hound or StitchingFanboy.com.
According to the article SONY DID NOT WRITE this application, seems more like Sony let them use PS3 dev tools to develop this.
And even if it was Sony that developed this....what do you think, that Sony only has like 3 people working for the PS division, Sony owns several game studios that do nothing but games, then theres their hardware division that works on nothing but the PS3 itself and its specific features.
Cool, but neither F@H or Home is enough to justify dropping all that loot for a PS3.
Hey, at least this will finally provide a benchmark for us, to show how fast the ps3 ACTUALLY is compared to the average pc.
My vote is on my 3.6ghz core 2 :)
So dont buy it. It is not for everyone.
They need to release this on the XBox 360 as well to expand their reach. I'm glad to see Folding@Home using the PS3 to add more data crunchers to their already swelling list, but please add the 360 as well! I'd gladly let my 360 run it, since I don't let my laptop do it.
Has anyone ever looked at the environmental impact of running machines full-tilt in their idle time vs. letting them sleep. I wonder how many additional tons of CO2 are in the atmosphere from these types of projects.
You're forgetting, America doesn't care about the environment.
10-30 times faster than a Pentium II desktop PC.
Cool, It will give my PS3 something to do until they make some decent games for it...
I'm looking forward to joing F@H when I get my PS3. I think its such an awesome idea. Donating unused processing power is the least you can do for people who need cures.
Now since there's only about 30 people with a PS3, they have a greater likelihood of being that person with a breakthrough. The problem of course is that you'll be doing this a lot considering there are no games to play.
First, Sony stuff isn't build to run 24 hours a day. Second, what advancements have been produced wit this software? Last I remember folding wasn't working on cancer, but working on vaccines for toxic weapons. Very patriotic but not a priority for the rest of the world that doesn't like the american army.
Yes! I want to pay $600 for a video game system so that some government sponsored agency can use up my bandwidth and cpu. F U SONY!!!!!!
My post wasn't meant to be anti-sony at all it was meant to highlight their current views on their console. All I've heard from them lately is new features that aren't doing anything to help get games out there or any marketing to sell their systems. I'd rather see more games for my system than this kind of stuff that I can already do elsewhere.
This kind of stuff reminds me of all the commercials I've been seeing recently regarding "Powe(red)" by Sprint. If you get this "Red" phone you're helping AIDS in Africa. Sure that's a great cause but the money spent on those damn commercials would have been better spent going straight to the cause. (Don't get me wrong I also see the side of putting this plague in the spotlight but millions of dollars spent on advertising something that might generate a couple 100 thousand doesn't justify that to me)
As for my comment on internet access I should have specified 'probably' but I think my point still stands. But I will accept that I was wrong in making the assumption I stated...too much emotion in trying to get real reasons for the purchase of a PS3.
I'm interested in how much power a ps3 running this will consume over the course of a month vs if the ps3 was actually just turned off.
Concurrently how much extra power you will have to use to counter the amount of heat the turned on ps3 will produce.
You could be paying an extra $10/mo to run this thing and then another $10 on top of that for extra AC or a Fan turned on during summer months.
I wonder if just donating $20 a month to the foundation would be more beneficial and less detrimental on the soon-to-be-maxed-out power plants?
They should have released it in December. If it was out in December, I'd just leave my PS3 on all the time, since I need heating anyway, and 180W of power that it draws under load would convert into heat just as well as in the heating radiator. By the time they release this, it'll be spring here and I won't be needing any heating anymore. To the contrary, I'll be running air conditioning.
I agree D. I have a PS3 and will NOT be using this. With all of the problems reported with overheating PS3's, why would I want it to be on when I am not directly using it. Bad idea given the circumstances.
Also, what about all the extra power you are using leaving this thing on. Your helping another problem which is global warming and energy waste.
Oh, it's true, a PS3 is doing as many tflops as about 30 cpu's are, HOWEVER, it is only doing as many tflops as ONE-HALF of a GPU (video card).
It' sall about the floating point math. CPU's aren't that great with it, it's not a large part os what they do. GPU's are super good at it, it IS what they do.
OK, so this may eventually help with the cure to cancer, unfortunatly, it would help the cancer of lame Xbox fanboys posting anything in a PS3 thread.... I kinda hope someone they know end up with something this may eventually cure, perhaps they will realize the importance of these programs, rather than posting their "PS3 sux" crap..
@mogbert
So.....your OS of choice at home is running off one of those newfangled vaporware CPU replacement cards?
Or are you just talking?
Bet your pre-release iPhone is dope too!
Frank your so cool how can I be you?
I'm not running the SMP version on Linux on my PC, but I get about 18 seconds per calculated frame on my E6600 Core2Duo running at 2.5Ghz in Windows.
The PS3 is getting .08 seconds per frame!? Wow.
Oh.My.God. Sony is doing something good with the PS3.
I have Cystic Fibrosis myself. for those of you who don't know what it is, it is a life threatening disease which shortens a person's lung capacity and life span to only 40 years. I just installed this onto my computer and I have also just joined Team Engadget. When I saw this for the first time that it will go for the PS3, I was thrilled. I can't wait to sign up for it on my PS3. I hope everybody who has a PS3 will sign up for it.
Frank: "Yes! I want to pay $600 for a video game system so that some government sponsored agency can use up my bandwidth and cpu."
Other than the fact that Stanford is a private university. Right.
To be honest, the data parallelism that Cell and RSX provide is quite impressive for running a program like Folding... although I would love to see what would happen if they got that running on a GeForce 8800GTX or something similar. Since I know the Folding project has gotten it running on AMD/ATI video cards, the performance advantage of the PS3, while absolutely incredible, may be quickly one-upped by R600. Until then, though, if you have a PS3, this is a very worthy cause to devote your high-end gaming hardware to when not playing Resistance, fl0w, or MotorStorm.
I care about reducing energy consumption as anyone else, but could there possibly be a better reason to use electricity?
Research like F@H, which owes its existence to the development of computing technology, is how we justify the time and money we spend developing powerful processors. This is what makes it truly worthwhile.
I'm not a big fan of Sony but i have to say this is pretty awesome...
Sony sell the PS3 at a loss and make the money back from games (as most of you probably know) and the fact that Sony lets applications like this AND linux run is amazing.
You would never see the 360 doing folding eh? (not unless its hacked anyway)
:)
Not only does FAH do biological research but it has also provided a lot of real-world experience with building massively parallel distributed systems.
If it didn't exist, either the research wouldn't get done or some well-endowed university biophysics departments might run supercomputers with thousands of CPUs themselves drawing a lot of electricity. I think it's conceivable that distributed computing will actually save energy in the long term by using idle CPU cycles rather than adding dedicated processors whenever a computationally difficult project has to be done.
i think this is an amazing idea
if you think about it, for the speed, ps3 is damn cheap.
you know how much it would cost to build a computer that fast?
the down side is, well, even tho im a 360 owner, and i never leave mine on when im not using it, i don't know anyone who would leave theres on, unless they don't mind the electric bill. iv got a fully loaded house, with 6 computers and 3 high def tv's and im trying to save as much power as i can, i just finished changing all the light bulbs in my house with compact fluorescent ones.
Regarding concerns about the power use by running the PS3 constantly, I run F@H on both my PS3 and PC. My PS3 seems to use less power than my PC, and it runs Folding about 20 times faster than my PC, so the PS3 is much much more power to performance efficient than my PC.