• BBC News, Monday, November 5, 2007 11 AM

Sony Corp. and the PlayStation 3 have now entered the record books, according to BBC News--after a project leveraging the spare processing power within the PS3 was found to help understand the cause of diseases. The network, called folding@home (FAH) enters the Guinness World Records as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.

FAH, so named for its ability to perform 3D simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics, has now signed up nearly 700,000 PS3s in an attempt to better understand diseases like Alzheimer's. A distributed computing network is able to solve large, complex problems by distributing the workload between many computers. The PS3 network is able to perform the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, according to the BBC report--all by using the idle processing power of PS3s that are connected to the Internet. Until March of this year, FAH only ran on PCs.

Read the whole story at BBC News »