Helping Science, One Playstation 3 at a Time

The following article is out of the new BusinessWeek and features one of the 2008 winners of Japan's prestigious Good Design Award. Not only is this just plain awesome, it makes use of a concept I'd personally like to see find application in many more venues throughout society: the involvement and utilization of technology and the vast computing power now found ubiquitously in the modern world. "Parallel computing" as it's called, is akin to more efficiently using our own brains. The power and capacity is already there, ready and waiting to be tapped. By finding appropriate and responsible application of this latent potential, we move toward creating a truly synergistic and sustainable network. In essence, a more complete and holistic use of the our resources, both physical and digital.

"Call it philanthropy for the technorati. In 2001, Stanford University researchers launched Folding@home to analyze the structure of proteins in cancers and diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's. Normally they would need a supercomputer for the number-crunching involved in simulating these proteins in action—proteins fold before they perform their function—but buying one would cost billions of dollars. Instead they decided to tap into the power of many computers connected over the Internet—a concept known as parallel computing.

Sony offered to help. In March 2007, Sony released a software add-on for its network-connected PlayStation 3 console that lets users lend power from their machine's powerful processing chip to the Folding@home project. Sony has sold more than 16 million PS3s so far, but it would only take about 10,000 machines to add 1 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, or one petaflop. That's as fast as the latest supercomputers, which are used for weapons development, scientific research, auto safety testing, and product design. The more computing power they have, the easier it is for researchers to study complex proteins. The beauty of Sony's idea was that PS3 users contribute without paying a penny—except maybe in the form of an uptick in the electricity bill."

See the full article here: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/11/1121_japan_design/

Several years back UC Berkley and SETI, an organization devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, started a joint project based on parallel computing. The aim was to harness the combined processing capability of thousands of idle home computers to assist in the analysis of huge quantities of data collected from space in the form of radio signals. The hope of course was that the program could expedite the discovery of a coherent signal from extraterrestrial origins. Check out the site at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Even if the XBOX is better looking (and it is), this is cool stuff. I want to see more of it, and I give Sony and Standford big props for it!