Many may be aware of the Folding@home project run by Stanford University, but thanks to Sony now they have a Guinness record. This record certifies the Folding@home project as the most powerful distributed computing system, reaching over 1 petaflop (thousand trillion floating point operations per second). In comparison the SETI@home project has only reached 256 teraflops (265 million floating point operations).
What does Sony have to do with the record. Well more than 600,000 PS3 owners have been donating their spare cpu cycles to the project and this along with others donating their PCs spare cycles have netted the project the World Record.
Source: News.com
By SaltwaterC November 2, 2007 - 3:03 am
PS3 is by far the star of F@H. Too bad that a WU is annoyingly slow on a PC CPU. For example my dual-core takes a lot of time and the agent is pretty unstable (*cough, hint* BOINC + WCG for PC/Mac *cough*) … Anyway, the agent runs on GPUs too. For example a ATi X1900XT has more raw power than the Cell CPU which is within PS3.
For a home based distributed computing, the processing power is great. From the raw power point of view, soon IBM is going to pwn with BlueGene/P which has a sustained power of 1PetaFlop/s and it can be scaled up to 3PetaFlop/s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene#Blue_Gene.2FP
By Jeremy Clark November 2, 2007 - 6:53 am
Yeah I used to run F@H but it wouldn’t let me PC wake up from the screen saver mode. I just recently bought a PS3, I haven’t put F@H on it yet, I’m thinking about it. My meager folding profile is here.