Sony recently announced that more than one million PlayStation 3 owners are taking part in Folding@home, the distributed computing project run by Stanford University.
The participation of PS3 owners in Folding@home allows the project "to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world's most life-threatening diseases," said project lead Vijay Pande.
More one million PS3 owners as registered participants breaks down to about two new registrants per minute, or about 3,000 new Folding@home members per day.
Folding@home's mission is to try and better understand how proteins fold, and how misfolds are related to various diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
PS3s currently comprise about 74 percent of the entire computing power of Folding@home.
When the project achieved a petaflop in September, it officially became the most powerful distributed computing network in the world, at least according to folks at Guinness World Records. A network of 10,000 PS3s can accomplish the same amount of Folding@home work as 100,000 PCs, making their computational ability an invaluable asset to the project.
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