Folding@home Leaps Into Record Books

By Greg McNevin

November 2, 2007: Stanford University’s Pande lab Folding@home project has been recognised as the largest distributed computing environment in the world by The Guinness Book of Records, largely thanks to support from Sony and its Playstation 3 user base.

The project aims to understand protein folding, misfolding and related diseases. As the project’s website puts is, “Proteins are biology's workhorses. Before [they] can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.”

To understand the mystery, the project uses a massive distributed network of computers to simulate protein folding.

The system works like a screensaver. When left on and unused for a period of time, the Folding@home software fires up and begins processing chunks of data sent out from a central server. Completed chunks are sent back to a central computer, greatly helping scientists in their studies of protein folding and its link to diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and certain forms of cancer.

Thanks to the console’s hugely powerful cell processor and internet connectivity the PS3 is perfect for the job, and thankfully, Folding@home has been a popular application for PS3 users wanting to do more with their machines than just play games and watch movies. 60 percent of the networks total computational bandwidth is now handled by more than 670,000 PS3s. This translates to more than a petaflop, or one thousand trillion floating point calculations per second – a milestone in distributed computing that has never been achieved before.

Even if it was given exclusive access to all of the supercomputers in the world, the project would still have fewer computing cycles than it does now.

“To have Folding@home recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful,” said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University.

“Without them we would not be able to make the advancements we have made in our studies of several different diseases. But 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.”

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