Sony and Stanford University announce tremendous progress in their first month of partnership. The Folding@home program is a computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, miss-folding and other similar diseases. When the program launched on the PS3 in March, PS3 user participation has been stellar, providing Folding@home unprecedented computing power that has put the research in overdrive. Thanks to the Cell Broadband Engine, the Folding@home program has exceeded all expectations.

“The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward,” said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead. “Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate. We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer’s and other diseases.”

A few areas of achievements made since the Folding@home program launched on PS3 include:

*More than 250,000 unique PS3 users have registered to the program in just one month.

*PS3 users are delivering nearly 400 teraflops, achieving a total computing power of over 700 teraflops at a single moment. This is more than double the computing capacity of the network before PS3 joined the program.

*The “halo-effect” of PS3 has been evident as the number of active PCs has increased by 20 percent in the last month.

“The PS3 turnout has been amazing, greatly exceeding our expectations and allowing us to push our work dramatically forward,” said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home program lead. “Thanks to PS3, we have performed simulations in the first few weeks that would normally take us more than a year to calculate. We are now gearing up for new simulations that will continue our current studies of Alzheimer’s and other diseases.”

Proving its ongoing support for Folding@home, SCE announced they will provide further enhancements starting April 26th for download off the Playstation Network. The new update is said to enhance the user experience and increase the folding calculation speeds, increase veisibility of user location on the globe and the ability for users to longer team and donor names.

“We continue to be thrilled with the ongoing contributions of the PS3 user community in helping the Folding@home program study the causes of many different diseases that afflict our society,” said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. “As we move forward, we are issuing a call to action for all PS3 owners around the world to download the Folding@home application and help this cause. These PS3 fans can also be part of history as the Folding@home distributed computing program inches closer to achieving a petaflop – a measure of computing power that has never before been reached.”

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