Since PLAYSTATION joined Folding@home in March 2007, participation by the PS3 user community has been phenomenal, providing Folding@Home with immense computing power that is helping to fast forward its research and reach one petaflop.  Image courtesy of Folding@home

PLAYSTATION 3 and Stanford University’s Folding@home program recently announced their achievement of one petaflop, the first time such a milestone has been reached on a distributed computing network.

A petaflop is the ability to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), the equivalent of every person on the planet perform 75,000 calculations every second.

“The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we initially hoped,” said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead.

“Thanks to PS3, we are now essentially able to fast-forward several aspects of our research by a decade, which will greatly help us make more discoveries and advancements in our studies of several different diseases.”

“When we introduced PS3, we knew its incredible processing power would allow for a great deal of innovation and creativity,” said Jack Tretton, president and CEO of SCEA. “It’s extremely rewarding to see that the scientific community has found a way to harness PS3 technology for humanitarian purposes and we continue to be amazed at what gamers and the Folding@home community have been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.”

The PCs that made up the Folding@home network numbered roughly 200,000 giving the program the equivalent of about one-quarter of a petaflop. On March 15, 2007, PS3 joined the program and since then close to 600,000 unique PS3 users have registered to the Folding@home network, bringing the overall computing power of the program to more than a petaflop.

PS3 users can join Folding@home by simply clicking on the Folding@home icon within the Network menu of their XrossMediaBar, or can optionally set the application to run automatically whenever the PS3 is idle.