"Folding at Home" and Sony's PS3

Not a course for geeks on doing laundry ... Folding at Home is a peer-based computational project that simulates protein folding, similar to what SETI@home is doing for extraterrestrial intelligence. The idea is that you donate your computer to a project like this when you aren't using it by running their screen saver.

Recently, Sony developed software for its new Playstation 3 to support the Folding At Home project. This report, from the gadget blog Gizmodo, illustrates just how powerful the computation of this system is.

... a small legion of 13,000 PS3s running the Folding at Home app account for most of the computing power in the project, amounting to about 56 percent (PS3s = 316 measured TFLOPS) of the total.