Clete’s Blog

Thanks to the addition of many Playstation 3 units (currently 24,417 of them), the Folding@Home project is cumulative doing 851 teraflops per second! This kind of performance is faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world, Blue Gene, which is owned by IBM. The number of Playstation 3 units that are folding is steadily increasing and many people are predicting that we will top 1 Petaflop within the next day or so! This is absolutely phenomenal!

Watch the stats climb hourly here.

Contribute by downloading a client for your computer (Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux) here!

Or, if you have a Playstation 3, update your firmware to 1.6 and click the Folding@Home icon under the networking section of the Cross Media Bar.

My stats:

Not even a full day after the release of the Folding@Home client for the Playstation 3, the total computing power of a mere 6,860 Playstation 3 systems has surpassed that of a vast 158,806 Windows computers! The Playstation 3 systems are calculating at a total of 168 Teraflops per second, whereas the Windows machines are calculating at a total of 151 Teraflops per second.

This is an amazing feat for such a small number of Playstations to outperform an enormous number of computers. Full credit must be given to both Sony and the guys at Folding@Home for negotiating building a client right into the XMB. This is pure genius. It is not possible to build clients straight into all computers, but with a controlled environment like the Playstation 3, it is ideal.

The Folding@Home team has also released a GPU client that will run on select few ATI cards. GPUs are very optimized for certain calculations and do very well with the kind of simulations that some testing requires.

A recent report by Vijay Pande, the project founder and owner, told users that the GPU and Playstation 3 advances will greatly accelerate the research being performed at Stanford. Vijay stated that simulations that once took months or even years, can now be done in as little as a few weeks to a few months.

The entire Folding@Home community is holding its breath, waiting to see if the Playstation 3 users will be enough to push the Folding@Home performance to over one Petaflop per second. Before the release of the Playstation 3 client, the Folding@Home performance was around 200 Teraflops per second. Already, still less than one day after the release of the client, the computing performance of the project as a whole has soared to around 408 Teraflops per second. The goal of one Petaflop is within reach.

Please read the link at the beginning of the article for more information on the Folding@Home project and how you can help with disease research. Anyone with a computer or Playstation 3 can now aid in research that can help to cure cancer and other deadly diseases.

Revision: Let me make it clear that high-end PCs and GPUs can fold faster (and do different types of units) than the PS3. Without the PCs and GPUs, the project would fail, as each type of CPU simulates different things.

[clete2@localhost proc]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported
clock : 3192.000000MHz
revision : 5.1 (pvr 0070 0501)

processor : 1
cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported
clock : 3192.000000MHz
revision : 5.1 (pvr 0070 0501)

timebase : 79800000
machine : PS3PF

More to come later. I’ll talk about my setup, as I don’t have an HDTV. (I am using my CRT computer monitor)