PS3 Client for Folding@Home Debuts, ATI GPU Version Soon

eliot1785 writes "Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable. F@H also announced today that they will release a client capable of running on ATI graphics processors. With these two new developments, F@H hopes to raise the total power of their distributed computing network to 1-10 petaflops. At the upper end of that target, the network would be faster than any current supercomputer, at least in terms of FLOPS." Reader TommyBear points out a collection of papers showing scientific advances made by the F@H researchers.

100+ Million PS3s - Staggering To Think About

[Anonymous Coward]

The Broadband Engine in the PS3 has roughly 210 Gflops of power at 3.2Ghz. That is around an order of magnitude more than most people's current Intel desktop PCs. Although that isn't really the full story since it is the memory architecture that makes Cell chips so much more powerful than Intel chips, but that is a whole other, very cool, subject. If even a small percentage of the 100+ million PS3s Sony will sell over the next five years are added to computation pool, the results will be staggering.

Re:This makes less sense than ever!

[Amouth]

"SETI pioneered the idea" ???

http://www.distributed.net/ [distributed.net] was doing it long befor seti@home

Re:This makes less sense than ever!

[terraformer]

It is... Energy Star is working [energystar.gov] and has been [energystar.gov] working on it for some time. Running one of these clients could cost the end user as much as $200 a year (assuming a high end machine and 24x7 usage). Now, if they do not mind, great, but most do not realize it. Anyhow, for those machines just sitting idle, the cost savings are somewhere between $20-$100 (hi assumes 24x7 operation) a year if you employ system standby.

Full disclosure: I work on both of those projects.

Re:Give Me!

[Mongoose]

Ah... the PS2 Linux 'kit' wasn't locked down really at all from a software standpoint. Hell, I don't even run the default distro on mine. All the cool kids run the debian based Black Rhino on theirs. It's not like the limits of the DMA access DVD drive mattered in the end. I just used the hdd, usb, and network personally. It was fun to port my little fps game engine over and play net games with PC clients. No signed binaries -- the main control feature was how you boot into OS, and I will admit there were work arounds for that to share your homebrew games with people w/o the kit.

Re:Yees, I Will

[Phisbut]

Can you elaborate more on why electricity is checper at night? Arond here they read the kw/h meter once a month and do a simple calculation.

Some provinces/states use what they call a "smart meter" to charge for electricity. Those meters not only record how much electricity you used, but when you used it. They can then charge more for using power during peak hours (11am to 5pm) than for using the same amount of power during off-peak hours (10pm to 7am). That is an attempt to encourage people to use less power during peak hours (therefore reducing the peak and everything it involves on the power grid).

Ref: See Toronto Hydro [torontohydro.com]

Re:Wii?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a conventional Wii development kit go to http://warioworld.com/ [warioworld.com] and fill out an application to become a Nintendo authorized developer (it's not easy, they have standards); after that it will only cost $2000 per development kit (which is about 1/10 of a PS3 dev kit; many development teams need 5 to 10 of these so it becomes a serious expense). It is possible that Nintendo will release a series of emulators and development environment for free (or a small fee) for those who want to make a virtual console game but there is no information currently.

Being that homebrew Snes games have been made for emulators since about 1996 (and N64 games since about 2000) I suspect the second Nintendo releases any information about the virtual console dev kit they will have dozens of games that are ready to be released.