Stanford Disease Research Effort Calls On PS3 Users

March 16, 2007
By David Needle
http://www.gridcomputingplanet.com/article.php/3665991

Sony announced it's going to give its PlayStation 3 (PS3) users the ability to help medical research. In cooperation with Stanford University's Folding@Home program, the entertainment giant said it will participate in a distributed computing system that already borrows compute cycles from PCs and other computer architectures.

The aim is to help support Folding@Home, a research effort trying to unlock the the causes of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis and many cancers. The program was originally launched in 2000.

"We're applying the technology to study biomedical questions such as folding, misfolding and Alzheimer's," Vijay Pande, associate professor of chemistry at Stanford, told internetnews.com. "We have a long track record of success with peer computing. About 2 million people have participated since we started in 2000."

Pande said there are currently about 200,000 computers that currently contribute to its distributed computing effort. He hopes to attract at least 10,000 PS3 users in the first month the program goes live, which is expected at the end of this month as part of a software update to PS3 customers. Participation is voluntary. PS3 users will just have to click a Folding@Home icon to participate by sharing their PS3 computer during times it's idle.

At its Web site, Folding@Home explains that proteins are "biology's workhorses -- its 'nanomachines.' Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery."

When proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well-known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

Sony wanted to participate and see what the PS3 could do beyond its bread-and-butter entertainment applications.

"This is a donation," explained Noam Rimon, software development manager at Sony. "The user has to be running the machine, but otherwise there is no performance hit. If you're playing a game, Folding@Home doesn't run in the background."

Folding@Home originally started out using spare CPU cycles but has since embraced video graphics processors as a means of crunching through work units. The protein fold simulations are floating point calculations, and GPUs are one big floating point calculator.

Pande said he was particularly excited about getting PS3 users because of the power of the Cell processor that runs it. "The PS3 with the Cell is about 20 times faster than a typical PC," said Pande. "If we can get 10,000 PS3 users, that's like getting 200,000 PC users. If we reach 50,000 users we're getting to roughly the level of a petaflop , it's a huge deal."

The Folding@Home project includes a server farm of 50 servers and about 100 terabytes of storage. Pande also said he has access to the second largest academic computer that's housed on the Stanford campus just up the hall from his office. But he describes the distributed computing system as far more cost-effective than a supercomputer.

While the number or participants varies, Pande said Folding@Home has developed software to identify reliable users and account for fluctuations in available processing.

Sony To Use PlayStation 3 Idle Time To Help Cure Disease

Software program harnesses idle time of Internet-linked home computers to perform protein-folding simulations that would take a single machine decades to complete.

By . Agence France-Presse
http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArti...rticleID=13800

March 19, 2007 -- Sony announced on March 15 that its PlayStation 3 video game consoles will be enhanced to join a supercomputing network researching causes of cancer, Alzheimer's and other incurable diseases. Sony said a software update that will be available by the end of March will enable users to devote their consoles' idle time to a Stanford University quest for diseases caused by "misfolded" proteins.

Such diseases include Parkinson's, mad cow, Alzheimer's, Huntington's and some forms of cancer, according to Stanford associate professor Vijay Pande, leader of the "Folding@home" project. PlayStation 3 console software will let users click on a "Folding@home" icon on their television screens to have their machines devote their computing power to medical research whenever games aren't being played. The program harnesses idle time of Internet-linked home computers to use the combined power to perform in months protein-folding simulations that would take a single machine decades to complete.

Processors in PlayStation 3 computers are approximately 10 times faster than chips in typical personal computers so adding the consoles to the "folding at home" network should boost simulation speeds, Sony said.

"Millions of users have experienced the power of PS3 entertainment; now they can utilize that exceptional computing power to help fight diseases," said Sony Computer Entertainment chief technical officer Masayuki Chatani. "PCs have been the only option for scientists, but now, they have a new, more powerful tool -- PS3."

Sony said it will make PlayStation 3 compatible with a variety of medical, social and environmental research efforts.

In perhaps the most well known distributed-computing project, researchers at the Berkeley campus of the University of California launched SETI@home in 1999 to help search for messages beamed from space. More than five million personal computers in countries around the world are combined in a network that uses excess computing power to study radio telescope signals gathered by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2007