Idle PlayStations to tackle diseases

Scientists are harnessing the power of idle computers in an effort to cure Alzheimer's disease, cancer, Huntington's disease, osteogenesis imperfecta, and Parkinson's disease under the auspices of Stanford University’s folding@home (FAH) project.

Now, the BBC reports that Sony has teamed up with US biologists involved with FAH to add networks of Sony’s PlayStation 3 to the task. The researchers estimate that 10,000 of the Cell-based machines joined together should be able to perform a thousand trillion calculations/s, quadrupling the performance of IBM's 280.6-trillion-calculations/s Blue Gene/L supercomputer.

The researchers will apply that computing power to the study of protean folding in order to gain an understanding of how failure to fold correctly can contribute to diseases.