Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

New Folding client for PS3

Music, auto shutdown options.

Sony has released a new version of the Folding@Home client for PlayStation 3, which you can download by clicking on the FAH icon on the XMB. KBAI.

According to the Sony US blog, the new FAH client now has an option to shut itself down after it finishes its current task, or after an amount of time set by you, allowing the console to submit completed data to Stanford University, which runs the project, before turning itself off.

The new version also has the option to listen to background music while you help find out why particular proteins aren't folding - something that has been implicated in Alzheimer's and various cancers - with track-skipping options and other expected features.

Folding@Home might seem like a silly little extra, but it would only seem that way to people who are stupid. Probably. It's a long-running project designed to examine protein-folding and the PS3's bundled software allows console owners to contribute their machine's spare processing power when they're not playing games or trying to make SingStore work.

Sony's contribution has already made a huge impact, according to the FAH project organisers, who claimed in November that the console had helped it become the most powerful distributed computing network ever in the eyes of Guinness World Records.