Game over for Alzheimer's
The new PS3 will be launched in November
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Saturday, 26, Aug 2006 07:35
Soon computer games will do a lot more than just keep the kids occupied for hours.
Sony has teamed up with a group of US biologists to harness the spare computing power of its new PlayStation 3 (PS3), due to be launched in November, to help understand diseases using a distributed computing project.
Distributed computing allow scientists to solve complex projects by distributing the work between a number of computers connected to a network, such as the internet. A number of projects have already been established, such as the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (Seti) computing project, which uses computers to analyse scans of outer space for intelligent life.
PS3 will team up with the folding@home (FAH) project, which uses connected computers to analyse the relationship between the shape of proteins and disease. Diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's are said to be related to protein's not folding correctly.
Volunteers who want to participate in the project will be able to download software for the new PS3 to donate their spare processing power to FAH.
The organisation will be using the computing power to simulate the folding of proteins, a complex process that would take a standard PC about 10,000 days to complete.
FAH's link with the new Sony games machine will allow it to utilise the power of the PS3's cell processor, which can perform 256 billion calculations per second.