KludgeHack

PS3 Triples Folding@Home Computing Power to Over 500 TFLOPS…

General purpose CPU’s just lost the race… the disproportionate contribution that Playstation 3 consoles are making to the Folding@Home is amazing. The OS statistics page for Folding@Home tells more:

The Playstation 3 is indeed dominating the charts.

PS3 is responsible for a whopping 72 percent of the computing power in the entire Folding@Home project.

There are even reports that It’s only a matter of time– a few weeks at most– before the PS3 constitutes more than 95 percent of the computing power in the entire Folding@Home network. This doesn’t surprise me in the least. The Playstation 3 can harness the considerable power of its specialized Cell CPU to crunch work units far more efficiently than any general purpose CPU ever could.

With these kinds of performance ratios there’s almost no point in adding general purpose CPUs to the folding network any more. It’s a waste of time, effort, and electricity.

“The project just needs about 18,000 more PS3s participating to make the Folding at Home project the first distributed computing project to hit a Petaflop. To put that into perspective, the Japanese MDGRAPE-3, RIKEN’s supercomputer, has about a Petaflop of computing power.”