PS3 helps Folding to record

The leader of the folding@home distributed computing project has paid tribute to PlayStation 3 owners for helping boost the project's processing power after it was recognised by Guinness World Records.

"It is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3, it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds," Vijay Pande, leader of the FAH project at Stanford University, said in a statement marking the occasion, who described the participation of gamers and consumers around the world as "extraordinary".

Guinness says FAH is now the most powerful distributed computing network ever, at over a petaflop, which is a lot more (technical term) than the 250 teraflops (trillion calculations per second) the BBC report on the subject points out the program managed when it was 200,000-computers-strong prior to its introduction to the PlayStation 3 cross media bar (XMB).

Since then 670,000 PlayStation 3s have been helping to "fold", contributing to the examination of protein folding and how it may be linked to diseases. Proteins that don't fold properly have been implicated in Alzheimer's and various cancers.

The record should put FAH in the proper Guinness World Records book. The record-gatherers are also producing a gaming-specific book, for which our own Ellie Gibson is a consultant.