Sony worked with Stanford University's Folding@home project to harness the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly.
"It has so much horsepower and, of course, when you're playing a game all that horsepowerwill be used for the game. But there are a lot of times during the day when somebody's not playing the game," said Sony's Richard Marks. "It seemed like a good idea to be able to use that horsepower for something else that is, in this case, good for mankind."
A network of PS3s would run even faster. Pande said that a network of 10,000 PlayStations would increase speeds by a factor of five, and 100,000 would be 50 times faster than what they can do today.
"It turns two years into one month, and that's a huge thing for us," he said. "It's more than us just being impatient, there are calculations that we don't run right now because any calculation that would take more than two or three years, we don't even start it."
To participate, users will just download a program into the PS3's hard drive. Then they just need to leave the machine on when they're not playing. The Folding@home team will divide their complex calculations into manageable chunks and then send it to the participating machines. The program and data will take up 10 to 20 megabytes - or about the size of a handful of MP3 files, Pande said.
"These interfaces are very nice looking, very scientific in a certain way. ... You can use the controller and navigate around," Hofrichter said.
All PS3s connect to the Internet, and Sony plans to make it easy for gamers to get the program when they go online, Marks said.
"What we want is for people just to have to make the decision to contribute electricity and benefit mankind," Marks said.
Ja saattaa olla niitäkin pelaajia, jotka omistavat Xbox360 -version ja ilolla siirtyvät päivitettyyn PS3 versioon.
). Wii tulee hyvänä kakkosena. PS3:n kaarevat muodot vievät tosin voiton. XO jää tällä saralla pahasti jalkoihin. Se on mielestäni kaikista eniten "lelun" näköinen. 