PS3 Helps Stanford Break Grid Record

Sony's PlayStation 3 has helped many players reach new personal records, but now the game machine has a new group achievement -- in the Guinness World Records.

Guinness has recognized the grid-computing project in which Sony PlayStation 3s are networked to provide processing power for Stanford University's Folding@home project, as the most powerful distributed-computing network in the world.

That milestone was reached last month. On September 16, the entire Folding@home project surpassed one petaflop, which a distributed-computing network had never before accomplished. A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

My post borrowed from the "Good for Rosetta@Home?" thread:

Who is the Rosie guru and sage who could provide such an answer?

I think with the switch to 65nm, it is now to the point where Rosie can no longer ignore the potential offered by gaming consoles and their installed base.

If Rosie won't parallel (or still requires "large" amounts of memory), that's fine. But lets somehow get an informed, reliable, answer.

For example, how was this possible?

"When David Baker, who also serves as a principal investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute, originally developed the code, it had to be run in serial - broken into manageable amounts of data, with each portion calculated in series, one after another.

Through a research collaboration, SDSC's expertise and supercomputing resources helped modify the Rosetta code to run in parallel on SDSC's massive supercomputers, dramatically speeding processing, and providing a testing ground for running the code on the world's fastest non-classified computer.

The groundbreaking demonstration, part of the biennial Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition, used UW professor David Baker's Rosetta Code and ran on more than 40.000 central processing units (CPUs) of IBM's Blue Gene Watson Supercomputer, using the experience gained on the Blue Gene Data system installed at SDSC."




And why wouldn't such a strategy work on gaming consoles (PS/3, xBox360, Wii) ???

I never got a definitive answer as to whether parallel processing is possible/beneficial as three cores running on the same model might have a lower memory requirement than three separate models.