Folding@home is a project that aims to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. Proteins are biology’s working machines, but before they can perform their duties they must assemble themselves (fold). The big problem occurs when they fold incorrectly, this leads to disease such as Alzheimers, Mad Cow (BSE), Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
So how can a Sony Playstation 3 help?
Well since 2000 PC users have been donating their spare CPU cycles to this project buy installing a peace of software on their systems. This Software essentially allows all these computers form a super-computer. The machines are then assigned peaces of work to process, once processing is complete the results are then returned. (This is known as distributed computing) Sony has just announced that they will be producing software for the Playstation 3 that will allow owners to contribute to the Folding@Home project.
For further information of Folding@Home please visit the website: http://folding.stanford.edu/