As consoles get more powerful, they break the boundaries of what they were originally designed for. While they were only limited to games before, they are now lending their power for use in the sciences, from medicine to computing the physics of two black holes colliding. Read more on the role of consoles in the fields of science by going to the full article.

Peter Hofstee is one of the brilliant minds behind the Cell that powers our PlayStation 3 (PS3) video game consoles. Designs for the technology, which started seven years ago, include multiple uses aside from playing video games. And the fruits of his labor, including those of Microsoft's and IBM Corp.'s, are beginning to be realized today.

Aside from the Folding@Home Project that has received a very warm welcome within the gaming community, the Cell technology is being used quite differently in Rochester, Minnesota. Mayo Clinic researchers are currently using an IBM Cell blade server and the clinic's own software to accelerate the processing of 3D medical images such as magnetic resonance imaging.

Germany Fraunhofer Institute scientists, on the other hand, used several Cell servers to reconstruct a 3D image of a beating human heart from MRI scans. The importance of this is that it allowed doctors to view the organ with special glasses and make virtual incisions in real time.

Also, the University of Washington in Seattle utilized the technology last year by demonstrating how the Cell technology can improve the quality and speed of ultrasound scans. "In the future, you might be operating on somebody and repairing their heart valve while only making minimal incisions and not even having to string a camera inside," commented Hofstee.

Hofstee's own PS3 is one of the 30,000 units newly lined up to participate in the Folding@Home project. Currently, more than 270,000 systems are actively helping, two-thirds of which are PS3 units.

With the release of firmware 1.6 for the PlayStation 3, along with it comes the Folding@Home software which many members of the gaming community have been waiting for. And yes, among those who have been looking forward to this potentially life-saving project is the QJ Team.

For those who are yet unfamiliar with the term, Folding@Home is a project which was started by researchers from Stanford University. The project involves the study of protein folding which has been thought to be the root of diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, Huntington's Disease, cystic fibrosis, and some types of cancer. The aim of the project is to help the researchers to build models and simulations of these proteins by lending them some CPU power and a bit of bandwidth.

Now that Sony has fully pitched in on this effort and is putting the power of the Cell processor to good use, gamers can now do their part by simply installing the Folding@Home software on their PS3s and letting the program run while the console is idle.

Well, we here at QJ are doing just that, but we would of course love some company from our readers. So, in order to turn this into a full community effort, we would like to invite all of our readers (or even if you're just passing by our site for the first time) to join the QJ.Net Folding@Home team.

It's fairly simple. Once you've launched the Folding@Home program, just press the triangle button to bring up the Options panel, select "Identity", and then select "Join an existing team". After that, just enter QJ.Net's team number and, voila! You're now a part of QJ.Net's Folding@Home team. Here's QJ's team number:

52781

There's nothing to lose while we have everything to gain as we help in the scientific effort to cure some of the diseases which many members of society have been or are currently suffering from. So, power up that PS3, download and install the software, join our team, then go make yourself a sandwich and proceed to feel good about yourself. Or you can just simply continue to sit in your living room, let the program run and watch that really nifty 3D background which shows the Earth in all its sparkly glory, AND feel good about yourself.

Visit: QJ.Net Folding@Home
Visit: QJ's PS3 General Discussion Forum

Sony's PlayStation 3 is about 20 times more powerful at calculating the folding of human proteins than an average PC. That's what you'll hear if you watch the cool video about how the PS3 is contributing to Stanford University's Folding@Home project.

In other words, the PS3 (with its amazing processing power) is a powerful data-crunching tool for scientists looking to cure cancer and other diseases.

And you can watch and see for yourself how the PS3 is calculating and simulating the actions of reactions of the very molecules that give us life or cause our diseases! This screenshot, taken from the Folding@Home site launched by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan (SCEI), shows the PS3 studying a molecule:

 

SCEI's Folding@Home website has this to say:

The goal of this project is to research protein folding and misfolding to gain an understanding of how these are related to disease. Targeted diseases include (but are not limited to) Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and many forms of cancer.

Here's a quick overview of why the PS3 is a valuable addition to Folding@Home. A previous QJ.NET article has more interesting facts and screenshots of the Folding@Home process on the PS3.

• The PS3 system's Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor will dramatically add to the computing performance of the Folding@home project.
• Folding@home for PS3 utilizes the RSX graphics processor to provide a real-time simulation of the folding behavior of proteins.
• The locations of PS3 systems that are running Folding@home are displayed on the world map that is visible in the background.

Folding@Home is an optional feature of an upcoming firmware update for the PS3 (Gamasutra reported that it's in FW 1.6).

If you want to help Folding@Home even more, you can also connect your PC to Folding@Home. A recent article about SETI@home had a shameless plug about "Team QJ.NET" (Jammie, modcase, etc.) and their Folding@Home effort.

Sony steps up for some corporate responsibility as it teamed up with Stanford University's Folding@home project, and all this in order to harness the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly.

Using a powerful new processor called the Cell Broadband Engine, PS3 is able to run highly realistic games like Metal Gear Solid 4, Full Auto 2, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07. This chip is the same one IBM is using in its supercomputer project for the Department of Energy. This supercomputer is said to be able to reach speeds of one petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Because there is so much horsepower in this chip, Sony thought that it might be a good idea to use it for something else. This time, something that could benefit not only gamers, but the whole of mankind as well.

How does the PS3 exactly fit into the scene of medical research?

Well, in observing the process of folding, or that where proteins start out in the body as long as strings of amino acids and have to assemble themselves into complex shapes, it is rather difficult for scientists to observe this because proteins are so small and the process is so fast--about 10 one-millionths of a second, in fact.

Now, scientists use computer simulation instead, But it takes about a day for a computer to simulate a nanosecond, so it would basically take about 30 years for that computer to complete one simulation, and that's a really long time. To be able to make this faster, Folding@home uses a network of about 200,000 personal computers to simulate how proteins assemble themselves! Heck, a network of 10,000 PS3s would run even faster! Vijay Pande, leader of the Stanford Project, says that a network of 10,000 Playstation 3s would increase speeds by a factor of five, and 100,000 would be 50 times faster than what they can do today. "It turns two years into one month, and that's a huge thing for us."

To participate, PS3 owners need only to download a program into the console's hard drive. Then, when they're not playing, they just need to leave their machines on. The Folding@home team will then divide their complex calculations into manageable chunks and then send it to the participating machines. But don't worry, since the program won't run when someone is using the PS3 since it might bog down the game. "What we want is for people to just have to make the decision to contribute electricity and benefit mankind."

Protein formation is important as improperly-formed ones are linked to a number of diseases, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gherig's disease), and mad-cow disease. So now, everytime you use your PS3, you're not only using it for entertainment, but more importantly, you're contributing to significant medical research that can cure diseases. See, there's goodwill in gaming, just as it should be.

Your PS3 may one day save lives.

We've told you before about the Stanford University chemistry department's Folding@Home (FAH) distributed computing project that turns your PC into a part-time medical research computer for analyzing proteins. (Yes, we at QJ also take time to worry and care about the bigger picture, so some of us have donated our own computers to the project.) Now FAH wants to enlist the computing and graphics power of the next-gen PlayStation in its research of proteins and diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and certain forms of cancer.

Sony will be providing software that will turn your personal gaming console into a client computer of the FAH project. While the Cell microprocessor crunches the chemistry, the graphics chip displays the actual folding process of the protein molecule in real-time - a first for FAH. If your curiosity gets the better of you - or you happen to be interested in medical chemistry - you can navigate the 3D space of the simulated molecule using your PS3 controller.

So far Sony has demoed the software recently in Germany, and FAH is conducting internal beta tests. They will most likely announce an open beta test sometime in September.

Maybe the guys at Stanford were as impressed with the Cell as these guys were. And they've decided to put it to good use - other than as a gaming processor, anyways.

We'll probably hear more of this when the PS3's finally released and good-hearted games everywhere decide to donate their console's "down" time to the greater good of mankind.