PS3 Grid Computing Catching On

By Greg McNevin

November 20, 2007: Following the overwhelming success of the Folding@home project, Sony’s Playstation 3’s distributed computing power is now being employed in biomedical research.

The new project, called PS3GRID, uses the global PS3 network to compute enzyme reactions and ion conductivity at for a group of international researchers from the Computational Biochemistry and Biophysics Laboratory at Spain’s Universidad Pompeu Fabra.

One PS3 gives the team the computational power of 20 normal PCs, and so far 130 PS3s have been connected to the grid. With 3 million PS3’s out there and many more flying out of stores due to a recent price cut, the team is hoping to add many more consoles to the effort and further expand its ability to run full-atom molecular simulations of proteins.

To be part of the effort, users download 512MB image onto a USB flash drive and then simply plug the drive into their PS3 and start the program. This enables the console to be added to the grid and perform tasks when it would otherwise be idle.

The PS3GRID project has also developed a quick and easy way to install and test drive Linux on a PS3, as well as join the grid effort with a BOINC client. The client is a Debian Live distro, and enables the open source OS to be booted off a pen drive like the projects other grid computing software. Once Linux has launched, the number crunching starts automatically.

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