Hit the jump to see the full release.

PlayStation®3 Users Significantly Contribute To The Folding@homeTM Program

Tokyo, April 25, 2007 - Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE) today announced that great progress has been made in the one month since PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) computer entertainment systems became part of Stanford University's Folding@home™ program, a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases. Since the program launched in March, participation by the PS3 user community has been phenomenal, providing Folding@home with immense computing power that is helping to fast forward its research. Furthermore, thanks to PS3's powerful Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.), the Folding@home program has become one of the most powerful distributed computing networks in the world and is quickly approaching a level of computing power that is of historical proportions.

Exhibiting its continued commitment to the program, SCE also announced that starting tomorrow, it is providing a Folding@home application update that will further enhance the user experience. The updated software features an improvement in folding calculation speeds, increased visibility of user location (*1) on the globe and the ability for users to create longer donor or team names.

"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."

Some of the key accomplishments 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 (*2)

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

"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."

PS3 users can download the new update version 1.1 by restarting the Folding@home application. New Folding@home users can join the program by simply clicking on the Folding@home icon within the Network menu of the XMB™ (XrossMediaBar) or can optionally set the application to run automatically whenever the PS3 is idle (*3).

Starting with Folding@home, SCE will continue to support distributed computing projects in a wide variety of academic fields such as medical and social sciences and environmental studies through the use of PS3 and hopes to contribute to the advancement of science.

– Jason Chen

PS3 Folding Kicking Ass, Getting Update [Kotaku]

Here's how:

Basically, If we can get another 20k of the 2 million PS3's out there now to start folding, the Stanford distributed computing project can still be the first to hit the Petaflop level. That's more crunch than the fastest super computer we know of, the MDGRAPE-3 in Japan. For now, Folding is merely the most powerful distributed computing system in the world...never mind the only system capable of playing HD games and movies.

While we wait for the PS3 to make history, Stanford's put an FAQ up that answers some of the mysteries we'd be wondering about.
*The Cell processor's strength is in crunching small sets of data — the PS3's 512MB of RAM limits
*The PS3 uses 200w per hour while folding.
*The PS3's GPU is being used by the Folding client.

Jump for more...

Folding@Home on the PS3

INTRODUCTION

Since 2000, Folding@Home (FAH) has led to a major jump in the capabilities of molecular simulation. By joining together hundreds of thousands of PCs throughout the world, calculations which were previously considered impossible have now become routine. FAH has targeted the study of of protein folding and protein folding disease, and numerous scientific advances have come from the project.

Now in 2006, we are looking forward to another major advance in capabilities. This advance utilizes the new Cell processor in Sony's PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as new advances with GPUs), we will likely be able to attain performance on the 20 gigaflop scale per computer. With about 50,000 such machines, we would be able to achieve performance on the petaflop scale. With software from Sony, the PlayStation 3 will now be able to contribute to the Folding@Home project, pushing Folding@Home a major step forward.

Our goal is to apply this new technology to push Folding@Home into a new level of capabilities, applying our simulations to further study of protein folding and related diseases, including Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease, and certain forms of cancer. With these computational advances, coupled with new simulation methodologies to harness the new techniques, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, and make even greater impacts on our knowledge of folding and folding related diseases.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)

BASICS
How do I get a copy of Folding@home for the PS3?
If you have PS3 system version 1.6 or later, you will see a Folding@Home icon in the Network column of the XBR (PS3 menu). Just click on the icon and that's it. If you don't have 1.6 or later, please perform a system upgrade.

Which keys do what?
Press square to see what the other controls do.

What is the power consumption of the PS3 running the FAH client? Is it safe to run the PS3 24X7?
We expect the PS3 to use about 200W while running Folding@Home. We have several PS3's running in our lab, running Folding@Home 24/7 and have had good results so far.

What type of calculations the PS3 client is capable of running?
The PS3 right now runs what are called implicit solvation calculations, including some simple ones (sigmodal dependent dielectric) and some more sophisticated ones (AGBNP, a type of Generalized Born method from Prof. Ron Levy's group at Rutgers). In this respect, the PS3 client is much like our GPU client. However, the PS3 client is more flexible, in that it can also run explicit solvent calculations as well, although not at the same speed increase relative to PC's. We are working to increase the speed of explicit solvent on the PS3 and would then run these calculations on the PS3 as well. In a nutshell, the PS3 takes the middle ground between GPU's (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WU's).

Can I change the donator name and team number?
Press triangle while in the visual client to change your username and team number.

STATS
How long will it take to complete the work unit (WU)?
We have set PS3 WU's to take approximately 8 hours to complete. The logic behind this was to ensure that the PS3 could be run only over night and still yield a useful result. We will likely decrease this time in the future to try to make it easier for PS3 donors to only briefly run their machines, but still make useful contributions.

When will my points show up in my account?
It can take 1-2 hours after the WU has been received for the points to be entered into our database. We usually run hourly updates, but during periods of heavy activity, it can become less frequent.

How are the number of active machines calculated?
One central problem in distributed computing is the calculation of how many computers are actively part of the project. Many projects merely cite the "total number of devices", i.e. the number of computers to ever be a part of the calculation. This can of course grossly overestimate the current power of the distributed computing network.

Instead, we calculate the number of "active" clients, i.e. machines that have returned work recently. Active PS3's are defined as those which have returned WUs within 2 days. This is a much shorter timeout than what we set for normal CPU clients, as the PS3 clients Work Unit deadline is much shorter (typically 2 days). However, as we communicate with the distributed clients fairly infrequently (no more frequently than every 8 hours), it is hard to precisely know how many machines are running and these numbers are best used as an order of magnitude estimate of the power of our network.

How are the FLOPS calculated?
People often use the number of Floating point operations per second (FLOPS) as a metric for the speed of a computer. One question that arises is how to compare machines with radically different architectures. In particular, what requires only a few operations (or even just a single operation) on one machine could require many operations on another. Classic examples are evaluations of functions like the exp(x) or sin(x). One GPU and Cell hardware, functions like this can often be calculated very quickly, say in one cycle, while this is often counted as 10-20 operations for other machines.

We take a conservative approach to FLOP calculation, rendering quantities such as exp(x) or sqrt(x) as a single FLOP, if the hardware supports it. This can significantly underestimate the FLOP count (as others would count an exp(x) as 10 or 20 FLOPS, for example). Others take a much less conservative approach and we are considering giving two counts, adding a more traditional (less conservative) count as well.

The ideal comparison would be to run Folding@Home on the supercomputer itself to test its speed. In this sort of comparison, Folding@Home would likely do very well, and we are investigating the best way to perform this benchmark, as we expect people would be interested.

It seems that the PS3 is more than 10X powerful as an average PC. Why doesn't it get 10X PPD as well?
We balance the points based on both speed and the flexibility of the client. The GPU client is still the fastest, but it is the least flexible and can only run a very, very limited set of WU's. Thus, its points are not linearly proportional to the speed increase. The PS3 takes the middle ground between GPU's (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WU's). We have picked the PS3 as the natural benchmark machine for PS3 calculations and set its points per day to 900 to reflect this middle ground between speed (faster than CPU, but slower than GPU) and flexibility (more flexible than GPU, less than CPU).

The PS3 is outrunning all the rest of the FAH client types. Should I stop my existing PC/GPU/... FAH clients?
No, the other clients are valuable to us too and we have chosen a points system to try to reflect the relative merits of each different platform to our scientific research. For example, the SMP client has been producing some very exciting scientific results and continues to be very important in our work. By supporting machines with lots of different functionality, we have a very rich set of hardware on which to run calculations, allowing us to tailor calculations to the hardware to achieve maximum performance.

Folding at Home Stats and FAQ [Stanford]
PS3 Folding [Gizmodo]

On average, between the superfast and superslow PCs, 159,033 PCs are only doing about half that much. (151 TFLOPS). Essentially, 13,000 PS3s have just made the Folding at Home Project the fastest distributed computing project on the planet, ever. (I believe it used to be SETI @ Home, which was something like 280 TFLOPS.) This also means the PS3 met Stanford professor Vijay Pande's expected one-month goal in one day. (We'll update this post with confirmation once Dr. Pande gets back to us.)

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.

And the potential goes on from there. There are 2 million PS3s in the wild, and over 100 million PS2s shipped thus far. PS3 owners, what are you waiting for? Get the word out to other PS3 owners. Let's help cure Alzheimer's disease. –Brian Lam

P.S. I'm sure there are CS majors out there who can fact-check this post. Post your updates in the comments.

Folding at Home Stats by OS [Stanford]
PS3 Folding [Gizmodo]

I'd done a little math, maybe faulty, maybe not, on how powerful the PS3 is compared is to the average PC on Folding @ Home. We'll have to see how long the first work units take to process, and check the stats later. Right now, PS3 says it's going to take about 8 hours to get done.

It would be neat if PS3 found the cure for Alzheimer's. Even the vicious anti-Sony bloggers can't spin that one wrong. –Brian Lam

PS3 Folding [Gizmodo]

PS3 Folding at Home [Gizmodo]

On average, of course. A researcher I spoke to said that the basis for the 30x folding power, a very math intense process, is a $1000 PC you'd buy today. Impressive. Since the Tflop rating is the capable power, measured by units per time, the 826 PS3s doing Folding in beta are already doing 1/6 the processing of all the active Folding PCs out there, over 155k of them. Good job Sony!

Just imagine what'll happen to the folding project once the app goes public, and 2 million PS3 users get involved. Do it!

Mock Prediction: Ps3 will cure Alzheimer's faster than you can get all the special weapons in Final Fantasy XII. - B.L.

PS3 Folding at Home [Gizmodo]

Sony's setting up the PS3's monster brain to handle Folding at Home distributed computing using cell processors. Folding at Home, the networked app that uses spare CPU cycles to do Alzheimers research, typically was done on the PC. It's ideal to use many PCs, over a network (the Internet) and combine those results. Instead of taking years on supercomputers, they can use thousands of home computers to make it happen at home. And now, PS3s. A good reason to buy one. (Consider it charity.)

The question for nerds is why fold on a PS3 over a fast PC?

Why PS3 — 20 to 30 times faster than the "average" PC. (We'll ask what that means in a bit)
It uses: Broadband, plus the Cell proc, and there are 2million PS3s out there. (They said that's a lot, but its really not. There are over 20M ps2s out there, and an uncountable number of PCs.)

The graphical component of folding on PS3 is strong. It should be much richer than the PC. (We'll see.)
Full HD, many display and found modes. Can watch the folding in real time.

They've been developing folding on PS3 since 2006.

Interactive visualizer. Can watch others in the world fold at home.

Load the folding at home icon, off the cross media menu. You can even set it to autoload.

On start, it will download the data for a protein molecule, and compute it locally, and then uploads it when you're done. (How long?)

Look, you can zoom in, and get performance stats, and join a team. I'm going to get a gallery up. And then a vid. Should be up in 10.

I'm done updating this post. Hit up this link to see the rest of our coverage. B.L.